Academic Diaries: 2016-17

My own academic diary for the upcoming academic year is an old favourite: the Palgrave student planner, modelled in last week’s close-up shot. While in France I like to use a French planner – it just makes the whole living-in-France thing a little more authentic – but in the UK I struggle to resist the old favourites. If they did medieval-themed planners, on the other hand …

Palgrave or not, though, it looks like the planner will certainly be needed! (Perhaps even doubling as a real planner this time.) Exciting Emails™ have started to come through, many of them bearing news of equally Exciting Dates™ that are, one by one, christening the still-crisp and undamaged pages of my planner as I inscribe and colour-code them. My favourite event invitation that I’ve received so far is the ‘Postgraduate Research Induction’, which is described, perhaps rather ominously, as a ‘compulsory requirement’ (as opposed to … ?). Admittedly, its description in the email does include the word ‘networking’, which might be a warning of what is to come, but I’m nevertheless looking forward to meeting the people with whom I’ll be sharing three years of fun / hard graft / writing crises.

Between now and then, plans for the remainder of the summer are starting to come together. First up, at the end of this week, will be the end of my teaching job. As ever, I’ll be sorry to leave, but hopeful of the opportunity to come back next year with a little more experience under my belt. This second year of work has been particularly rewarding, as I’ve begun to take on responsibilities for writing the course materials. One thing that’s just the same as last year, though, has been how much I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to really connect with my students, and to enjoy the looks of joy on their faces when they finally ‘get it’!

Once the job is wrapped up, the next step for me will be to — well — ‘slow down’ for a bit. One common theme among the advice that I’ve been getting recently has been the need to enter the PhD well-rested, and it would indeed be foolish to go against advice like that! This will actually be slightly tougher for me than you might expect. As my dad likes to say, I have two speeds: flat out (i.e. going really fast) and flat out (i.e. on the floor). To be honest, slowing down isn’t something I’ve ever been very good at doing, so any advice on this front, dear reader, would be very much appreciated. My current plans include sleeping (a lot) and reading (a lot); while admirable aims, as I’m sure you’ll agree, they don’t really tally with the whole ‘doing less’ thing.

For now, though, I’m focused on the last week of teaching, and more specifically, on my upcoming classes on higher education. On a slightly inauspicious day for the subject, I suspect that my students — as always with this topic — will have plenty to say.