I’ve organised a guided walk at Sungei Buloh Wetlands Reserve close to the 6th of December annually since 1997 in celebration of the reserve’s anniversary (SBAW). To do this I recruit guides, decide on and arrange for specimens, plan transport for guides and participants, advertise and process registration and queries.
This year I finally started on Monday and now we have about 100 people to be guided by 8 route guides and 4 station guides on Saturday. We are also throwing in a short slide talk and a guided exhibition of specimens from the Raffles Museum.
This is in the midst of my heaviest exam-marking period, so this SBAW event is quite the nightmare. I want to throw in the towel every year thinking about it and drag my feet. I do realise that when it finally happens, it’s a lovely experience for all. People meet and connect with each other and nature and some of our NUS students get deeper into biodiversity studies through this.
The life savers who hep me carry this off are the Raffles Museum Toddycats, all volunteers who chip in and smoothen the edges. They are part of the guiding team recruited for the event 0 and they all respond quickly to the invitation. They are either veterans or honours students who are already amply prepared by their modules and research and sometimes by their previous attendance at this event. So training is skipped unlike the late 90’s when I worked this with freshly trained guides only..
A lot more people are able to attend these days and so the team is larger. And the biggest pre-event help to handle this amplification is Google Forms!
Google Forms collect registration data which is deposited into Google Spreadsheets – the image above is the first page and summary sheet, so contact data is hidden. Spreadsheet functions help track registration, transport requests and registration capacity. This year’s summary form is not pretty, but critical.
I update an SOP document as I go along, in Google Docs, as well as debrief points in preparation for next year’s walk.
So I finally got myself started on Monday by setting up the webpage and registration form. Emails were then sent out and the university community are always quick to respond to the email adverts, somehow.
I then hunt down additional guides – honours students in their post-exam stupor. Then I tend to the registration form every 3-6 hours.
In between I mark and mark and mark and tend to all the other things that usually crop up.
But Saturday will be so nice, I will decide to do it again next year.
From the SBAW webpage: Who are your guides? – Airani S, Kok Oi Yee, Marcus Ng, Adrian Loo, Anand Balan, Ivan Khong, Anne Devan, Trina Chua, Xu Weiting, Siti Aisyah Bte Jamal, Joanne Khew, Teo Kah Ming, Grace Lo and N. Sivasothi (a.k.a. Otterman).
Otterman speaks... 