My New Split Personality

Next week I will celebrate my 8th year of employment at KU Endowment. For those of you who don't know, KU Endowment is the fundraising and fund management arm of the University of Kansas. My office building is pictured on the right. The University of Kansas also has an Alumni Association, pictured below, which is completely separate from KU Endowment. Both organizations are completely separate from, but affiliated with, the University itself. Confused? Of course you are. You can easily see why so often people ask me about how things are going at Alumni, when I actually work at Endowment. It's a reasonable mistake to make, since many universities have one organization that handles both the fundraising and the alumni memberships.

This story actually does have a point. A couple of weeks ago, my boss and boss's boss came into my office and made me an offer. One of our programmers was splitting his time between KU Endowment and KU Alumni, but they wanted to bring him back to Endowment full time to work on some new projects, which meant they needed someone to fill his shoes as the part-time programmer at Alumni. So, as of today, I am spending 60% of my time writing and running reports at KUEA, and 40% of my time doing the same at KUAA. Crazy, huh? Now when people ask me how things are at Alumni, instead of saying "I don't know, I don't work there," I can give them a knowledgeable and reasonable answer!

You can find me at KUEA in the mornings and at KUAA most afternoons, where I will be hiding out in my tiny new office that overlooks the Religious Studies building. Not very impressive, I know, but I'm looking forward to new faces and new challenges at my new location!