I just got an email from Debbie, the HR representative in the department, and things are going to get confusing soon. As I mentioned earlier, I am supposed to change pay grades and get a second raise, in addition to the normal raise in July. My starting salary was pretty low and my boss has been really happy with my work, so he pushed for a pretty large increase.

Apparently, due to paperwork regulations, I have to resign my current job and formally reapply for the higher paying position - even though it is the same job I currently have. In addition, they have to officially list the both positions on the website, even though I am already hired and they don't want to hire anyone else.

I am new to this whole process, but it seems a little excessive to me.

Anyway, I was given copies of my current job description and my "new" job description and the only differences are that I am supposed to spend 20% of my time programming in c++ and MatLab from now on, and can oversee any undergrad part time workers. The programming is something my boss and I had discussed earlier and I have been trying to pursue.

Boss Dave and I agreed that it would be really awesome if I could take over one of the projects in the pipeline and make it my own study - taking over the responsibilities of everything from programming to publication. To do that I've been trying to teach myself c++ from online tutorials, Ry's old textbooks, and the lab's library of old experiments - but it's been slow going.

I have some basic programming knowledge with Java and MatLab from college, but nothing up to the standard I would need in order to understand and run the experiments our lab does; they are very technical and involve interfacing eye tracking, motion tracking, and OpenGL. It certainly isn't easy to find time, especially when this summer has been insanely busy. Even right now I have 8 separate experiments (8 subjects each) for 4 different people in the lab, and most of them need to be 5 consecutive days which doesn't leave me much free time during the week. I find it really hard to sit down and look at code when I only have an hour of free time before a subject arrives.

But I am doing my best to learn the programming in an attempt have this study running by the time students return in the fall. So, learning c++ and MatLab got me a raise, that's pretty cool.

I just need to find more time to actually learn....