A day in the life
My name is Ellie and I’m a consultant at dandolopartners.
Prior to working at dandolo I trained to be a secondary teacher. However, I decided not to pursue a role in classroom teaching. I was interested in working in education policy and was very fortunate to stumble upon dandolo. I’ve really enjoyed my time here, the work is interesting, impactful and challenging, the people are passionate, hardworking and it’s a lot of fun.
Here’s what a typical day as a consultant at dandolo might look like:
8:00am
I leave my house and begin my stroll to work. Our office is just behind the State Library and right near Carlton Gardens, so my daily morning walk involves a lovely stroll through the gardens. I listen to one of my favourite podcasts to accompany my walk, and enjoy a rare sunny Melbourne morning.
8:45am
I arrive at the office and say hi to everyone there. We have team meetings every Monday, and so the office is always busy. I pop my lunch in the fridge and chat to Hannah while she makes a cup of tea in the kitchen, and hear about her weekend in away in Kyneton. It sounds lovely.
I then pick a desk for the day, respond to some emails and teams messages, check my diary for the week and make a plan for the day.
9:30am
It’s my turn to do the coffee run, so I grab the collection of reusable coffee cups that I have collected on the bench indicating who wants a coffee and head to our local favourite. As it’s a Monday I’ll need a helping hand, so Indi offers to join me, which means we get to chat about that weekend’s nail-biting Formula 1 race.
10am
We get back just in time for team meeting, and everyone gratefully accepts their coffees and we bundle into one of our larger meeting rooms. Team meeting is always a fun part of the week as we go around the table and share highlights from the previous week and sometimes, dependent on the chair of the meeting, our answer to a bonus question. Today’s question is ‘What is the best vegetable?’ which has prompted some feverish debate. We also get a chance to hear any updates from the directors, what our project allocations look like for the week, any new projects coming up and any learnings from recent project debriefs.
10:45am
Team meeting finishes a bit early so JP and I catch-up talk about a project we’re on together. We’re doing a strategic review of an education program delivered to regional and remote schools around Australia and have a number of interviews this week. JP and I are sharing the roles of lead interviewer and notetaker and so divide up our list of interviews for the week and the roles we’ll take for each. We also take a look at our prepared interview guides and brainstorm if there’s any other questions we might want to ask for specific stakeholders. For example we’re talking to someone today who delivers a similar program, so it would be great to test the similarities and differences between their program and the one we are reviewing.
11am
JP and I have jump into an interview with someone who works at a science centre in Western Australia. I’m leading this one and JP is taking notes. Once it’s over we thank the participant, and take some time to debrief and reflect on what the key takeaways were, and the implications they might have for the project.
12:15pm
I catch-up with Lauren, Ayushi and Lucy for a project check-in and to confirm our approach for an upcoming meeting with a client. It’s a regular project client catch-up, but there’s lots happening at this stage the project, so it’ll be good to update the client with what where we are up to with our fieldwork. This project is a big evaluation of two early learning STEM professional development programs, and we are doing lots of fieldwork including online discussion forums, a survey and interviews. Lauren’s the project manager, so she confirms our responsibilities for the week.
12:30pm
Lunch time! I pull my lunch out of the fridge, heat it up and sit around the office lunch table. Ella has made a delicious lunch as always, and so I discuss the recipe with her and gets some tips. Some others come back with their orders from Fish Bowl, an office favourite, and join us. Saskia shares an interesting finding from a project she is doing comparing funding models in early childhood education and care, and aged care sector. It’s a great part of the job because we’re all on different projects, we get to chat to each other about what we are working on, and learn from each other about different policy areas, contexts, concepts and issues we may not have had a chance to work on ourselves yet.
1pm
I catch up with Lucy about the evaluation we are on together. We’ve just closed an online survey targeted at participants of the program, and so we now need to analyse the responses. We meet up to come up with a plan of how we’ll approach the analysis and divide and conquer the tasks with the time we’ve got this week.
2pm
I jump into another interview, this time with an academic in the early childhood education and care space. It’s a real privilege to get to speak to such smart, passionate people working in a range of interesting contexts. She emphasises the real challenges for early years educators in accessing and implementing professional development given current workforce challenges, which is only exacerbated in regional and remote areas. It’s great hear her perspective, and to test some of our findings with her.
3pm
It’s time for a brain break. Mid-afternoon most days someone calls out ‘brain break!’, and if there’s a consensus we all gather around someone's desk and do an eclectic mix of online quizzes and puzzles. At the moment this includes Connections (from the New York Times), ‘reheardle’ (a daily music quiz), and usually another online quiz. We did pretty well today, Stacey really helped us out with her sci-fi knowledge and classic literature expertise.
3:15pm
I’ve got a new project starting this week, so I take some time to do some preliminary research. It’s an evaluation of a project which developed resources around primary prevention of violence against women with disabilities. It’s a policy area I haven’t worked on before, so I chat to Nikita who has some experience in it from when she worked in government and she directs me to some key reports and policy documents it would be good to familiarise myself with ahead of the project kick-off meeting.
5:30pm
I wrap up just after 5pm and say goodbye to whoever is left in the office and ask about any plans anyone has for that evening. I’m heading to a theatre show in the city so I ask for any tips on where I should grab dinner nearby, and then head out the door.