I spent the day with rubrics and spreadsheets.

Libby Gruner writes an occasional column for Inside Higher Ed.

This is not exactly the life I envisioned when I began my graduate work....

But the rubrics and the spreadsheets happen to be part of the job too, right now, and I'm learning to embrace them. The rubrics, after all, will help us to evaluate the job we're doing in the new program I'm helping to build. If we don't write them well, they're just busy work, but if we really think through them carefully we might learn something from them. (Yes, I still retain some of that youthful naïveté!) The spreadsheets are simply the easiest way I know to organize and compare the data my program is collecting — about courses, about workshops offered and taken, about summer training plans. They're not lovely, nor can I make them do everything I want them to (yet), but they are a useful tool.

And now, for the rest of the story...