Hello everyone! Today, I wanted to do a day in my life! I picked a workday so I can share what my life is like as an academic advisor.

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Now, I do have my puppy niece with me so she is also featured in this post!

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6:30am wake up

I did my Simple Morning Routine recently so I guess I’ll skip some details here but this is generally what I get up to in the morning!

After I get up and get ready for the day I head outside to water the garden. I’ll skip this if it rained the night before but otherwise I’m out there watering!

After that, I will go back inside to get the dog! I am dog sitting for my sister, so in the morning when I’m watering the garden she will typically go snuggle with her grandma for a bit. When she hears the water shut off she knows it’s time for her morning walkies! She’ll run down and be waiting for me to come inside to get her. I try to take her for a 20-30 minute walk in the morning but she tends to want to potty and head right back for breakfast.

I’ll prepare her breakfast and then make my coffee while she is eating. Then we head upstairs! I typically have about 30 minutes at this point before I start to work. I will update my bujo, blog, or update my monthly budget with my recent bills, spending, and paychecks. I’ll also be sure to double check my calendar as I’ve been up to a lot lately!

My Morning as an Academic and Finance Advisor

So at 8am I will start my workday! I work from home so the commute is amazing. I’ll typically finish up whatever task I’m working on a few minutes before 8 so I can boot up my work laptop and login.

So I work for an online university as an academic and finance advisor to students. I am assigned to the university’s school of business. Typically the students are graduate students so a lot of MBA students but there are other master’s programs in the school of business. I also tend to have post-master’s certificate students and doctoral students as well.

For the first hour I structure my day. I take a look at the daily tasks for the day as we are given a general guide of how we can split up our weekly required tasks per day. It does make the work much more manageable so I try to stick to it as much as possible.

The three hours after that are spent working through my daily tasks, as well as answering phone calls from our student queue. The university I work for requires that someone be available at all times to answer student questions during the work day so we are all assigned three hours to be in the queue and available to answer the phones. This is everyone’s least favorite part of the day from what I gather. It is super annoying as it makes it hard to actually get our work done for almost half the day due to the constant interruptions. I don’t really mind the actual calls, as I used to work in a call center before so I’m used to the crazy sort of calls that can come through. But I hate the interruptions!

After that I will take half an hour to wrap up anything I had been trying to work on despite the interruptions and finish answering emails/voicemails I got that morning or even the day before. We are expected to respond within 24 hours, which I think is a little much since every other department at the university has a 48 hour window. Then I’ll take lunch!

Lunch

I will have a half hour lunch so I’ll take the dog out for a quick potty and mini walk. After that we head back inside and I’ll quickly make myself some food before heading back up to my home office for the rest of the day!

My Afternoon as an Academic and Finance Advisor

The afternoon tends to go pretty fast since it’s the shorter part of my day! I finish up any daily tasks, maybe start working ahead on other tasks, catch up with coworkers, and finish up tasks that require more concentration than I could give in the queue.

At work I do have a group chat on MS Teams with some other coworkers who started around the same time as me. We tend to try to video chat at least once a day to either catch up or try to help each other figure stuff out. We tend to try to ask and answer each other’s questions there first too and help each other out as much as possible. I think it’s really been working out very well and we really enjoy keeping each other sane.

Also in the afternoon I’ll typically have meetings and/or trainings from time to time because I’m busy in the queue in the mornings. There are two team meetings scheduled in the week, a department wide meeting on Fridays, and periodically there will be a training or even a division wide meeting too. I tend to try to work through the more boring ones although sometimes there will be side chats going on in MS Teams if there’s anything interesting going on.

At 4:30pm I am finally done for the day!

My Afternoon and Evening Routine

About two days a week I do log off and rush to either ballet or to the library but for the other three days I will typically be logging off just as my dad gets home from work, so the dog ditches me to hang out and say hi to her grandpa while I finish clearing off my desk and shutting down my work laptop.

We tend to have dinner pretty soon after, then the dog and I head back upstairs to play with her toys or just hang out before I take the dog for her evening walk. I will also try to read a bit during this time since I’m typically trying to finish a library book before I have to turn it in again. Since it’s summer, I tend to wait until closer to 7 to take the dog out as it’s still light out but not as hot.

After that I will shower, get ready for bed, and make sure to offer the dog a chance to eat more kibble or drink more water before bed. I think I’ll do a whole other post on my evening routine but basically it’s Netflix and Animal Crossing time, along with dog snuggles time! And that’s how I end my day!

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So there you go! A pretty simple day but I do feel like I get a lot done. I also love having my puppy niece around as she gets me outside at least 2-3 times a day versus the one walk I would probably take without her around. I love working for home and I feel so much more at ease with this great perk of my new job. It makes my work day so much better!

Thanks for reading!

Pamela

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