Hell Week

The Navy SEAL “Hell Week” is the third week of the famously grueling BUD/S training. The official description reads, “Hell Week tests physical endurance, mental toughness, teamwork, attitude, and your ability to perform work under high physical and mental stress, and sleep deprivation.”

It is a perfect description of the last week of each X-Culture round. We are now in the “Hell Week” of the 2017-1 season.

Here is simplified list of tasks that need to completed during this week by my assistants and me (add to that the final exams that we all have to deal with in addition to X-Culture):

END-OF-PROJECT ROUTINE

1. Handle the hundreds of questions and complains we receive in the last week as the teams are trying to finalize and submit their reports, including:

a. My team member didn’t do his work, what do I do?
b. My team member is not responding, what do I do?
c. I did all the work, can you please punish my lazy team members for not doing their work
d. Is it OK if we use MLE citation style instead of APA?
e. Our plagiarism/similarity index is 20%. Are we going to be disqualified?
f. I didn’t receive my final survey link.
g. I was sick and could not participate the past two weeks, now my teams says they don’t want me back and that they are already done with the report.
h. AND ABOUT A THOUSAND OTHER QUESTIONS

2. Ask instructors for photos of their class
3. Catalogue the photos as they arrive and post them on our website
4. Download, sort, and relabel the PDFs of report drafts
5. Send reminders to teams whose drafts are missing
6. Check plagiarism stats on each draft
7. Correct plagiarism stats if multiple submissions from the same team are flagged
8. Record date of draft submission, number of pages, and similarity index for each draft
9. Download, sort, and relabel the PDFs of the final reports
10. Send reminders to teams whose reports are missing, check for technical problems, etc.
11. Sort out double submissions, wrong file submissions, etc.
12. Check plagiarism stats on each final report
13. Correct plagiarism stats if multiple submissions and draft-final confusion
14. Record date of final report submission, number of pages, and similarity index for each draft
15. Keep sending out reminders about the post-project survey
16. Review post-project survey, comments, suggestions, and concerns and identify actionable suggestions.
17. Make updates for the next round as per these suggestions (update documents, routines, etc.)

REPORT EVALUATIONS
18. Prepare the list of reports by instructor and report evaluations rubrics and guidelines
19. Send out the reports and report evaluation guidelines to the instructors
20. As the evaluations start coming in, sort and catalogue them
21. Send out reminders to the instructors whose evaluations are missing
22. Issue a call for emergency reviewers
23. As people volunteer, continuously keep records of who volunteers to be an emergency reviewer so that everyone gets only as many additional reports as they volunteered to do
24. Identify reports that are likely to not receive enough evaluations and assign them to the volunteer emergency reviewers
25. Consolidate all evaluations into one database and send out to all instructors
26. A week later, add the late submissions, update the consolidated database and send out one more time to all instructors

CERTIFICATES AND RECOMMENDATION LETTERS
• Student Certificates
27. Prepare new Student certificate templates
28. Ask the instructors to check the templates for accuracy and correct errors
29. Create a separate PDF file for each instructor’s class and send them out to the instructors
30. Correct more errors identified by the instructors only now, redo the certificates and send them out again
31. Keep sending out the certificates again to the instructors who missed the first time and ask for a copy
32. Prepare the final list of the students who successfully completed the project; send out letters to those who failed, dropped out, was excluded, or had other performance problems that they will not be getting the X-Culture certificates
33. Handle the complains and explanations
34. Prepare a final post-project personal review of performance for each student
35. Generate 4,000 + certificates and personal recommendation letters and send them out to each student individually
36. Handle the many emails in response to the messages with the certificates and recommendations
37. If anyone orders hard-copy certificates, order print
38. When hard-copies arrive, package them, write addresses, and mail (do over and over again when people order them later)
39. Send out receipts for the shipping and handling orders

Do the same for:
• Instructor Certificates
• Instructor Recommendation Letters
• Boss Support Letters for Instructors
• Student Recommendation Letters
• Student Test Performance reviews
WINNER CERTIFICATES AND RECOMMENDATION LETTERS
40. For a Best Team and Best Instructor committees, send them the performance data and ask to select the Best Teams and Best Instructors
41. Ask client companies to review their reports and also select winners
42. When ratings are received, consolidate and finalize the list of the winners
43. Inform all concerned parties
44. Design and order print of the winner certificates and recommendation letters
45. Get mailing addresses of all winners
46. Mail out Winner Certificates
47. Wait for lost-in-mail complaints, re-print lost documents and mail them out again
48. Respond to the many thank you letters, questions, requests for additional copies, lost copies, etc.
49. * Used to also have a cash prize. After spending tens of hours each semester on trying to pay out the cash prizes, dropped due to the extreme time requirements.

By Vas Taras