The aspect of my letter that stood out to me the most was not how much my perception has changed, but rather how little. To be more specific, how much my perception of Ecoworks has remained relatively constant. My coworkers remained incredibly friendly for the duration of my time there, and every new person I met displayed the same passion as those before them.
It’s interesting looking at how the work I completed compared to my expectations. I remember that when I wrote that letter I had primarily just been doing small, tedious tasks and was waiting for a larger project. While I did receive a few projects that were more time intensive, a majority of what I completed was a variety of small research tasks. While that wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do, I was prepared to do that kind of work as discussed in my first letter where I state “…doing important yet tedious work for the common good.” While I was fine with completing tedious work, it was the importance part that I struggled with. There were several times where after completing a lengthy research task, it would be presented to a larger group and they often didn’t take the project any farther, making my research meaningless. I understand the necessity for this to occur because you can’t determine whether a project is worth enacting unless research is conducted, but nevertheless it can be incredibly frustrating.
I felt that frustration too. I did a ton of work just to have someone higher up basically do it all again. It stinks but we are only underlings with little control over anything.