Master's Research Project

Chris's Master's Research Project has been the bane of our existence for about a month and a half.  Let me break it down for you...
Chris was first supposed to send out and analyze all the results from a survey about how prepared Baylor PA Graduates felt when they graduated, and it was supposed to go to about 250/300 people (only graduates in the last 10 years). It was supposed to be pretty simple.  It quickly evolved into Chris being placed in charge of surveys going EVERY Baylor PA Grad AND the doctor they work for...that is about 800 graduates plus 800 doctors.
Since the PA Program is covering all the cost of Chris's Master's Project, they wanted to keep the costs down.  So instead of making things easy to get out in the mail we had to fit everything into regular envelopes which meant A LOT of folding.  I think in total we've probably spent about 30 hours combined on this project.
Every envelope contains:
- cover letter to the PA with a 2 page survey...tri-folded together

- a cover letter to the doctor with a 2 page survey...tri-folded together

- 2 tri-folded return envelopes

We also had to put on the labels which sounds easy, just slap them onto the envelope right? Wrong- graduates in the past 10 years are getting a different survey then older graduates, so we had to keep that straight, which should have been easy- just print the labels off in two separate groups...except the people who printed them did it all alphabetically, so we had to go through an search out every label for the newest grads...and somehow the list wasn't completely alphabetical...frustrating.

All along the way we were thwarted.  These were supposed to be out BEFORE Christmas Break, but the order for the letter printing was never put in on time, then it was finally done and the labels weren't made, then the wrong envelopes were ordered, the last straw was that we are completely missing the class of 2009...so even though we're "done" we still have more to finish once we get that list...
The sad part is that there are machines that could have done the same work we did in just an hour...oh well- it's done and since the results are needed by April Chris will have more time to spend with us later in the year during his research months!
Here's our final total in numbers:
-800 envelopes stuffed
-4800 pieces of paper tri-folded
-1600 return envelopes tri-folded
-800 labels placed
-30 hours of work (or more...we really stopped counting!)

 needless to say- we're glad to be done.