For those people who don’t work in academia, this time of year is probably no more or less significant than any other time, but for us lecturers it’s the end of another long, hard term. For some reason that I can’t fathom, the spring term is always very tough and so the holiday period seems like a welcome respite from enjoyable but hard work.
But unlike other people who enjoy ‘holiday’ time from work, for us simply being outside of term time means that a whole new way of working will start for the next few weeks. First, I am off to a conference in Seattle. It’s a big, exciting, prestigious one and so I will be representing my institution as well as networking like mad. Then on my return there are a large number of essays and dissertations to mark. This is a job I enjoy very much, although I think I might be unusual in this! I have to go to Manchester to pick up the papers, liaise with second markers to hand the papers over to them and then arrange meetings to discuss our agreed marks. So while not a horrible task, it’s certainly a time consuming one.
And what about that fabled research time one hears rumours about?! There’s not going to be much of it this ‘holiday’ time, although I do hope to fit in a few short trips to the library and I will take advantage of a few precious days here and there to make a start on my research that can be done using online resources. I am very lucky to be able to do considerable amounts of research from the comfort of my home office, but it’s hard to section off large portions of time to get really stuck into it. So this Easter will be a time management challenge as much as anything: certainly not a holiday in the traditional sense at all!
