My New Job

So about 7 weeks ago we moved to Utah. The job I got is with Western Governor's University.

"The best relatively cheap university you've never heard of."

-Time Magazine

(If you're interested, you can read the whole article here.) My position is a new one here at WGU. It's not even the position I applied for! I applied for a coordinating-type job posted on their website, but during my interview, they brought up my background and we discussed a little bit about my real interest to eventually get into a more analytical type position within the company when one comes available. Several weeks later I got a phone call saying that they are in fact creating a "statistical analyst" position and would like to go ahead and offer it to me. I was super excited and agreed to move to Utah just after Christmas.

Because WGU is an online school, we provide students with online "courses of study" (essentially, hyped-up syllabi) with links to various online "learning resources" with which they can learn what they need to learn. WGU pays for a lot of these resources, but until now, no one has been really monitoring these costs. So my job is to monitor the Learning Resource costs. My role has evolved into a sort of liaison between the LR department and the Accounting department. I am happy and I enjoy getting to work with numbers and create reports for the CFO, although I don't quite get to use as many statistical analyses like I would like to be able to. My goal is still to move into the Institutional Research department eventually. They get to work with fun stuff like student survey data and do statistical calculations with lots of variables. :)

So for anyone who has asked me, "What university do you work for again??" this is it. I had never heard of WGU before either, but the more I have gotten to know about it, the more I like it. It's really a great school and I'm even thinking about getting an MBA here soon. Oh, and at our company-wide conference last week, the school mascot was announced:

The NiteOwls.

Boo-ya! :)