It has been a week of depressing university politics, wrangling, budget worries, stressed project students and testiculation. Have you ever noticed that academics in seminars can't resist just talking for the sake of talking*? I went to one this week which really tested my patience and made me all crabbit. It was 2 hours and 45 minutes long, the result of blokes butting in with their tuppence worth so the official speakers didn't have a chance to say their piece. And they were mostly blokes, before anyone gets their hackles up. Sometimes most of my working life seems full of blokes testiculating - the inevitable consequence of being at a science and engineering university. To add financial insult to woffling injuries, did you know that women computer science academics earn 81% of men's salaries for equivalent posts?** See? It makes me crabbit!
Want some more depressing news? Consider EPSRC's new policy. If you are not familiar with academic funders, EPSRC is a UK government research council which funds science and engineering. Academics apply to them for funding for research projects. (This is where my Adventure Author was funded from). Your career progression relies in bringing in this funding. University departments sink or swim, depending on how much grant funding comes in. EPSRC have now changed the regulations so that researchers with a less than 25% rate on their applications get banned for applying for more funding for a year. They say it is to reduce the load on their reviewers. It's likely to be extremely effective given that at the last round of decisions about funding, the panel which considers my field awarded funds to only 27% of the projects! Hah! Almost everyone would be blacklisted, no? It's most certainly a "rich get richer" types scheme. My only consolation is that is means that university departments will have to stop their relentless pressure on us to keep applying for lots of grants. Fewer applications but higher quality will have to be the name of the game.
Having depressed you, I feel obliged to cheer you up again. I leave you with a quote from David Patterson *** from an article about supervising students. "What I learned from the book was that people were happy with their careers if they designed or built objects that lasted ... or if they shaped people's lives such as patients or parishioners. Thus I went into the job of assistant professor with the hypothesis that my long lasting impact was not the papers but the people. Thirty-two years later I can confirm that hypothesis: your main academic legacy is the dozens of students you mentor, not the hundreds of papers you publish. My advice to advisors is to get your students off to a good start, create stimulating research environments, help them acquire research taste, be a good role model, bolster student confidence, teach them to speak well publicly and help them up if they stumble, for students are the real coins of the academic realm."
*and some, like me, blog for the sake of blogging.
** Klawe, M., Whitney, T., and Simard, C. 2009. Women in computing---take 2. Commun. ACM 52, 2 (Feb. 2009), 68-76. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1461928.1461947
*** Patterson, D. A. 2009. Viewpoint
Your students are your legacy. Commun. ACM 52, 3 (Mar. 2009), 30-33. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1467247.1467259 : 33
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