A Day in the Life: one job, one blog

And for those of us who are not research students:

5am: Get up to feed kitten and then go back to bed.

7am: Get up to keep kitten company, make tea, read email, myResearchSpace and online news, then wake 11 year old and get him ready for school.

8:30am: Go to work. Organise a car service for Friday, grab the first coffee of the day (UniClub) and start office work. For two hours I clear out the in-tray by signing reference letters, congratulation letters, candidature applications, international applications, leave forms, nomination of examiners forms, travel grant requests, email etc. I read the agenda papers for Academic Board this afternoon, and re-read the expressions of interest for a position in the GRS. I talk with daughter #1 on GoogleTalk (she stayed with friends last night), and organise a placement for a visiting Italian research student in engineering. Quick walk to Barrett's for coffee #2 and a chat with daughter #2 who works there (and also didn't come home last night!)

11am: Informal interviews. Very interesting. Got me thinking about how easy or difficult it is to abstract from practice to principle. I'm very interested in how we model things: the physical world, human transactions, how and why we work etc, and then how we make various abstractions that both explain and guide future action and are applicable to other instances of whatever it is we are modeling. The key is being able to easily move between the various levels of abstraction.

1pm: Grab a quick make-it-yourself roll from the Hackett casbah and return to my office where I get a call from the Vice Chancellery explaining some new accommodation arrangements for Hackett Hall. Very exciting: I'm getting a new office sometime in the not too distant future!

2:15pm: Academic Board for the next 2 hours. Much of the discussion centred around the current Course Structures Review. Don Markwell gave a good briefing on why we are doing it (great international context as well) and then we ranged over various questions. I was asked to speak on the idea of using research as a hallmark of the UWA degrees. Additionally, the Board debated awhile on the various conditions surrounding adjunct and clinical titles and the VC spoke about the recent Federal Budget and its implications for UWA. He wants us to grow to about 25,000 students (we are currently about 17,500), and to have 18% of these research students (we are currently about 12%). So I still have plenty of work to do! Ended the meeting talking to one Head of School who wanted to know if we could organise an examination process for a PhD student who is dying of cancer - very sad.

4:30: Back in the office to finalise things for the day before heading home for some guitar practice before having to cook. I'm taking an exam in a few weeks' time and need to practice my scales and pieces! Arghh ... not enough hours in the day.

7pm: Cook (2 kids in, 1 out), clean, talk with husband, pat kitten, help son with maths (there are lots of pleasures in life and that is definitely one of them) then think about my next big task. I've been asked to examine a thesis for a university in New Zealand. The thesis arrived on my desk a couple of days ago. I didn't open it then but just noted with relief that it didn't look too thick. I read the instructions to examiners instead, and then tonight brought it home. I probably won't start before the weekend, but here's what I did first off this evening. I opened the thesis and looked at how long it is: 146 pages, not counting the references and the appendices, so size is about right for this area. I read the Abstract. It's a bit abstract for my liking. It tells me what the problem area is and what sort of approach is taken, but it doesn't really lay claim to new results. It's more of a meta abstract than an abstract. It tells me how he approached the thesis problem rather than what he discovered. Hopefully more will be revealed when I actually start reading the thesis. I then looked at the reference section. I assume I have been chosen as an examiner because this is an area I've worked in and I have a number of publications on the topic. However, none of them are in the reference section! This is not really a problem; maybe he has an entirely different approach to the topic. I looked for a declaration at the beginning of the thesis to tell me what papers he has published: there wasn't one, but the reference section details three refereed conference papers at a New Zealand conference. So what am I doing here? Not much, just fiddling around calibrating my expectations. I'll probably start making judgments when I start the body of the work. They'll depend very much on the quality of the writing (what sort of ethos is established), and then as I move through the thesis, what sort of results I find. No doubt I'll write more about this as I go through it.

10:30pm: Enough, and enough of blogging. I finish every day reading fiction; currently I'm reading Fingersmith by Sarah Waters. Early days, but I am enjoying it.