Top 5 things Mark's learnt in the last 4 months

1) Budgets are hard
... or rather, if you're leading a project you don't have to know every detail of every aspect of the project.  You panicked because you had no previous experience of building and managing a budget and in your mind that meant that the project would fall apart and it was your fault for not knowing enough.  In reality everything was fine because Peter and Melita both have more than enough experience of successfully wrangling budgets for projects and had everything under control without you understanding what Full Cost Recovery is... you still don't and that's absolutely fine!

2) Young people enjoy working hard!
This shouldn't be so much of a revelation for a hardworking young person, but New Saints has done such great work individually and as a group already.  You've always rallied against anyone who automatically precedes 'student' with 'lazy' and the preconception about young people is just the same, yet here you have a group of young people voluntarily dedicating time, effort and brainpower because they want to, hooray!

3) Ask stupid questions.
Actually, ask all questions, you'll soon find out whether they're stupid or not... even then, don't stop asking questions, its all another tick in the box of Things I've Learnt Today.  At the very least it'll remind people that you're very new to this and should be allowed leeway when you need it.

4) Accept praise.
Don't just blush and brush it off, no-one's going to praise you unless you definitely deserve it, so allow yourself to feel good when someone tells you you've done well.  Otherwise you'll never escape that 'flying by the seat of your pants' 'only just managed by the skin of your teeth' feeling!

5) DON'T PANIC!
You're only 22, and this is your first taste of real life work after years in a lovely uni bubble of lovely.  By a lot of others' standards you should be sitting in the corner of a dark office doing nothing more responsibility-laden than endlessly putting numbers in excel spreadsheets, or phoning people and finding out just how much they don't want to talk about car insurance, so enjoy working on something you actually enjoy doing!

If anyone's got any comments/suggestions for learnings they've had in a similar situation, drop us a comment :)