Bunts, Bloop Singles, Sacrifices, Hard Base Running, and Lots of Luck

Alkin shares stories about his own evaluation life that he prepared for the American Evaluation Association (AEA) 2013 symposium session, based on his responses in interviews conducted by David Williams and on his earlier writings. He briefly mentions his father's influence on his values and extraprofessional evaluations before giving several examples of evaluation experiences he had as a teacher and counselor, as a university student, as a new faculty member, and as a home buyer—all before or while learning about the field of evaluation. He explores how an accumulation of experiences throughout his career and life provided opportunities for him to apply what he learned in his extraprofessional evaluation life to the formal approaches he took in conducting and writing about professional evaluation.