First week of the rest of my life
Jul. 8th, 2023 09:37 amAs of a week ago, I have officially quit my job, quit science and academia, and started in earnest working towards ordination.
( diary )
( diary )
Just want to show off one of the big projects my team has been working on for the past several months:
Pathogen Genomics: A New Era
This is part of our huge-scale Covid training project, but we've decided that in 2023 people need to know about other infectious diseases as well. So this is a broad-ranging MOOC about how to use pathogen genome sequencing in an applied way, from scaling up to national and international epi/pandemic response, to getting politicians to take into account the science when making decisions about public health.
The intended target audience is people involved in pathogen surveillance and public health in some way, but anyone broadly scientifically literate (and we've all found ourselves learning technical stuff about epidemiology in the last three years) should get something out of it. If you're scared by the term "surveillance", it does very much include discussions of how to balance keeping close track of viruses while maintaining the privacy and freedom of the human hosts. And a ton of very honest accounts from people working at the frontline over the past 40 months, discussing what their work was like in the real world and the trade-offs they had to make.
It's taking a really international view; our big aim here is to move away from the model where we talk about Europe and the US with one little token case study from the Global South. So even if you know quite a lot about what went down in North America and how that was different from Australia and China, you might learn something about cutting edge public health in Thailand, Trinidad & Tobago, Nigeria and lots of other places.
The course is completely paid for by our funders (including the FCDO and the Wellcome Trust) so if you do sign up you get the full benefits of paid membership for free. In theory it's supposed to take about 3 weeks but anyone who signs up can access the course for a year. There's no problem with just dipping in rather than taking the course in linear order. It's not as slick as, say, a TEDTalk but it's real and honest views from some of the people who really know most about what's changed since Covid, including some of the people responsible for the advances.
I'm really proud of it; of all the things I've achieved in my career this project is probably most directly relevant to saving lives and changing the world. My direct report did most of the coordinating but what's good about it is that it really has been a team effort and a massive collaboration. Also I rather like the slightly Star Wars vibe of the title!
Pathogen Genomics: A New Era
This is part of our huge-scale Covid training project, but we've decided that in 2023 people need to know about other infectious diseases as well. So this is a broad-ranging MOOC about how to use pathogen genome sequencing in an applied way, from scaling up to national and international epi/pandemic response, to getting politicians to take into account the science when making decisions about public health.
The intended target audience is people involved in pathogen surveillance and public health in some way, but anyone broadly scientifically literate (and we've all found ourselves learning technical stuff about epidemiology in the last three years) should get something out of it. If you're scared by the term "surveillance", it does very much include discussions of how to balance keeping close track of viruses while maintaining the privacy and freedom of the human hosts. And a ton of very honest accounts from people working at the frontline over the past 40 months, discussing what their work was like in the real world and the trade-offs they had to make.
It's taking a really international view; our big aim here is to move away from the model where we talk about Europe and the US with one little token case study from the Global South. So even if you know quite a lot about what went down in North America and how that was different from Australia and China, you might learn something about cutting edge public health in Thailand, Trinidad & Tobago, Nigeria and lots of other places.
The course is completely paid for by our funders (including the FCDO and the Wellcome Trust) so if you do sign up you get the full benefits of paid membership for free. In theory it's supposed to take about 3 weeks but anyone who signs up can access the course for a year. There's no problem with just dipping in rather than taking the course in linear order. It's not as slick as, say, a TEDTalk but it's real and honest views from some of the people who really know most about what's changed since Covid, including some of the people responsible for the advances.
I'm really proud of it; of all the things I've achieved in my career this project is probably most directly relevant to saving lives and changing the world. My direct report did most of the coordinating but what's good about it is that it really has been a team effort and a massive collaboration. Also I rather like the slightly Star Wars vibe of the title!
So I tested positive for Covid for a full 14 days. By that point I had decided that I was likely not to be infectious any more and could ethically emerge from isolation, but fortunately I did get my second negative test anyway.
( busy week, some Covid discussion )
( busy week, some Covid discussion )
Organizing teaching resources
Feb. 10th, 2022 07:36 pmSo the first online course of our giant international Covid training project is live: behold The power of genomics to understand the Covid-19 pandemic.
I'm mainly linking to show off, but you're welcome to join if you'd like. It's pitched at a scientific audience but if you have high school biology and some general curiosity you'll probably make sense of most of it. Totally free of cost and it doesn't matter if you poke at it but don't complete it.
Getting it over the line has been a massive enterprise; basically it's involved three months of shifting our entire way of working from a local thing mostly run by me and senior minion, to this incredibly complex collaboration with the COG consortium, already a huge mega-group across many different institutions. Plus we are desperately trying to decolonize! all! the! things! and work on an equal level with experts from all over the world, even though most of the UK team are used to a Eurocentric model of training.
I mean one of the reasons it's slightly delayed is that Omicron hit in the middle of the development process. The African-led group who first identified the variant got extremely angry with the rich countries that punished their disclosure instead of helping them with the crisis. Which was entirely justified but we got somewhat caught in the backlash and a bunch of previously enthusiastic African collaborators decided they didn't trust Europeans at all any more. We are honestly trying not to be parasitic White Saviours, but it's a learning curve and it's basically fair that we've run out of benefit of the doubt and second chances with some people.
Anyway, work discussions and planning have reminded me that in my personal life, I've spent the pandemic years creating and accumulating a huge pile of teaching resources, while I'm teaching on Zoom and don't have access to books, or the books available aren't suitable for what I'm trying to achieve. But it's all a big mess just dumped into a directory on my computer.
I know I have information management people among my circle. Would you be willing to give me some hints for organizing all my electronic teaching materials? I feel like I should know this kind of thing based on my professional experience, but actually... I've either been in large institutions and relied on infrastructure and expert support, or I've been in backwaters who never really had an IM strategy and just got away with things being in a bit of a muddle because the scale was small enough that it never got unmanageable.
What I need is some kind of sensible plan for my personal materials, so I can find them again and adapt and reuse them. I am willing to spend some money but not five figure sums on subscribing to a service meant for institutions, not individuals. It needs to be something fairly easy to use; if even starting to tag and store things becomes a massive faff I'll end up just not doing it. I would strongly prefer something where the architecture is on my own computer and not in the cloud. I don't have a massive amount of stuff in terms of file size, just a very large number of mostly text files. Backups would be good but that's not the main part of the problem I'm trying to solve.
And-a-pony level would be something that can easily manage a mix of English language and Hebrew language materials, but I can probably catalogue things in English and use transliteration as appropriate.
I'm mainly linking to show off, but you're welcome to join if you'd like. It's pitched at a scientific audience but if you have high school biology and some general curiosity you'll probably make sense of most of it. Totally free of cost and it doesn't matter if you poke at it but don't complete it.
Getting it over the line has been a massive enterprise; basically it's involved three months of shifting our entire way of working from a local thing mostly run by me and senior minion, to this incredibly complex collaboration with the COG consortium, already a huge mega-group across many different institutions. Plus we are desperately trying to decolonize! all! the! things! and work on an equal level with experts from all over the world, even though most of the UK team are used to a Eurocentric model of training.
I mean one of the reasons it's slightly delayed is that Omicron hit in the middle of the development process. The African-led group who first identified the variant got extremely angry with the rich countries that punished their disclosure instead of helping them with the crisis. Which was entirely justified but we got somewhat caught in the backlash and a bunch of previously enthusiastic African collaborators decided they didn't trust Europeans at all any more. We are honestly trying not to be parasitic White Saviours, but it's a learning curve and it's basically fair that we've run out of benefit of the doubt and second chances with some people.
Anyway, work discussions and planning have reminded me that in my personal life, I've spent the pandemic years creating and accumulating a huge pile of teaching resources, while I'm teaching on Zoom and don't have access to books, or the books available aren't suitable for what I'm trying to achieve. But it's all a big mess just dumped into a directory on my computer.
I know I have information management people among my circle. Would you be willing to give me some hints for organizing all my electronic teaching materials? I feel like I should know this kind of thing based on my professional experience, but actually... I've either been in large institutions and relied on infrastructure and expert support, or I've been in backwaters who never really had an IM strategy and just got away with things being in a bit of a muddle because the scale was small enough that it never got unmanageable.
What I need is some kind of sensible plan for my personal materials, so I can find them again and adapt and reuse them. I am willing to spend some money but not five figure sums on subscribing to a service meant for institutions, not individuals. It needs to be something fairly easy to use; if even starting to tag and store things becomes a massive faff I'll end up just not doing it. I would strongly prefer something where the architecture is on my own computer and not in the cloud. I don't have a massive amount of stuff in terms of file size, just a very large number of mostly text files. Backups would be good but that's not the main part of the problem I'm trying to solve.
And-a-pony level would be something that can easily manage a mix of English language and Hebrew language materials, but I can probably catalogue things in English and use transliteration as appropriate.
Language things
Sep. 28th, 2021 10:29 pmSo today I worked in the office for the first time in a year and a half. I'm exhausted from leaving the house at 7:15 am and not getting back until 7 pm, I've spent more time indoors with non-bubble people than basically the whole pandemic put together, and I'm not at all convinced it was worth it. However it is work policy that we have to be in person one day a week and honestly four days a week remote is better than the pre-pandemic situation of WFH being a very rare exception. The new normal involves hot-desking, and regular PCR tests, which I also don't love, but I think I will hate it less when it becomes more routine and when my team are also around for campus days.
Anyway, rather than whine about my mostly quite fortunate work situation, have some links I've enjoyed recently.
1] Twitter thread explaining kerning. Best if you can read both text and images as there are lovely animations explaining the concepts. If you find thread readers more accessible than Twitter there are some unrolled versions in the first few comments, though I'm aware that some people have moral objections to thread readers.
2] Video explaining an demonstrating American accents. On YouTube, visuals add a little bit of framing but are not essential. A transcript would be basically meaningless since the whole point is to hear examples of different accents.
The main presenter, Erik Singer, is a real virtuoso, a dialect coach who can imitate lots of different accents really well. Maybe all this stuff is completely elementary to Americans or linguists, but I learned a lot from the way he explains both the history and the phonology of different accents. And he's not making value judgements about different accents, just explaining how and why they are different. I particularly like that he invites linguists from various ethnic backgrounds to explain the accents of the communities that they belong to and study.
3] We're just at the end of the cycle of autumn festivals, with Simchat Torah, which celebrates reaching the end and restarting the annual reading of Torah. The Ark Liberal synagogue in north London has a cool video showing what the Torah scroll looks like. Many communities have a custom of unrolling the whole scroll for Simchat Torah and this is a kind of digital equivalent, though for some reason they roll from the end to the beginning rather than in the obvious direction.
This is also on YouTube; the visuals are the whole point. There is an audio track consisting of the kind of Israeli-Jewish songs that are often sung at the festival, but if you can't hear it you don't lose much. If you've never a seen a book written on a parchment scroll before the video gives a really nice impression. And if, like me, you didn't get to an in person Simchat Torah service because of the pandemic, it's a nice little memento.
Anyway, rather than whine about my mostly quite fortunate work situation, have some links I've enjoyed recently.
1] Twitter thread explaining kerning. Best if you can read both text and images as there are lovely animations explaining the concepts. If you find thread readers more accessible than Twitter there are some unrolled versions in the first few comments, though I'm aware that some people have moral objections to thread readers.
2] Video explaining an demonstrating American accents. On YouTube, visuals add a little bit of framing but are not essential. A transcript would be basically meaningless since the whole point is to hear examples of different accents.
The main presenter, Erik Singer, is a real virtuoso, a dialect coach who can imitate lots of different accents really well. Maybe all this stuff is completely elementary to Americans or linguists, but I learned a lot from the way he explains both the history and the phonology of different accents. And he's not making value judgements about different accents, just explaining how and why they are different. I particularly like that he invites linguists from various ethnic backgrounds to explain the accents of the communities that they belong to and study.
3] We're just at the end of the cycle of autumn festivals, with Simchat Torah, which celebrates reaching the end and restarting the annual reading of Torah. The Ark Liberal synagogue in north London has a cool video showing what the Torah scroll looks like. Many communities have a custom of unrolling the whole scroll for Simchat Torah and this is a kind of digital equivalent, though for some reason they roll from the end to the beginning rather than in the obvious direction.
This is also on YouTube; the visuals are the whole point. There is an audio track consisting of the kind of Israeli-Jewish songs that are often sung at the festival, but if you can't hear it you don't lose much. If you've never a seen a book written on a parchment scroll before the video gives a really nice impression. And if, like me, you didn't get to an in person Simchat Torah service because of the pandemic, it's a nice little memento.
So. Um. This is now public: my employers just won a major grant to help train the whole world in Covid sequencing and analysis, to the same high standard that the UK's Covid Genomics Consortium (COG-UK) have achieved. For the next two years, I'm the education specialist in a massive cross-institutional team trying to save the world from the pandemic.
( work changes )
I think I have some emotions about this, but I'm not quite sure how to describe what they are.
( work changes )
I think I have some emotions about this, but I'm not quite sure how to describe what they are.
Work update
Mar. 5th, 2021 02:19 pmThank you to all of you who helped with my two new courses. I wanted to show off the finished products.
Bioinformatics for biologists somehow managed to attract ten thousand people! The reason we made the course in the first place was because a lot of people were asking for it, but I'm really pleased to see such a huge number pouncing on it.
Genomic Scenarios in Primary Care has basically eaten my 2021 so far, so I'm especially glad to get it out of the door. It feels good to be working in medical-adjacent training again. Doctors can be frustrating to work with because they do absolutely everything at the last minute, for the entirely understandable reason that patient care is always their first priority and is prone to emergencies. But they are also genuinely awesome colleagues if you're willing to be very, very relaxed about deadlines, just really knowledgeable and excited to communicate.
(If you go delving in those courses you can probably figure out my wallet name; I'm not really worried about that. I just don't want search engines to be able to find this journal based on my rather unusual name.)
Courses are free of charge, you do have to provide a meaningful email address but that's all. It's totally fine to sign up if you're just curious, but I think some of you or people you know might find them actually useful and interesting.
Bioinformatics for biologists somehow managed to attract ten thousand people! The reason we made the course in the first place was because a lot of people were asking for it, but I'm really pleased to see such a huge number pouncing on it.
Genomic Scenarios in Primary Care has basically eaten my 2021 so far, so I'm especially glad to get it out of the door. It feels good to be working in medical-adjacent training again. Doctors can be frustrating to work with because they do absolutely everything at the last minute, for the entirely understandable reason that patient care is always their first priority and is prone to emergencies. But they are also genuinely awesome colleagues if you're willing to be very, very relaxed about deadlines, just really knowledgeable and excited to communicate.
(If you go delving in those courses you can probably figure out my wallet name; I'm not really worried about that. I just don't want search engines to be able to find this journal based on my rather unusual name.)
Courses are free of charge, you do have to provide a meaningful email address but that's all. It's totally fine to sign up if you're just curious, but I think some of you or people you know might find them actually useful and interesting.
Please help make my courses awesome
Jan. 22nd, 2021 10:11 amSo back in that weird twilight zone between the Before Times and the Time of Isolation, I asked for volunteers to beta read a new free online course I was producing at work. During the weird 10 months since, we have been working somewhat interruptedly on new material, and we now have two new courses for release in the coming weeks. I'm looking for beta testers again.
( details )
Other than doing some good for the world, what you get out of it is a £25 Amazon voucher. So in order to get paid you need to be in a position to receive and spend an Amazon voucher. We might possibly be able to acquire vouchers for other countries' versions of Amazon, or else I can informally arrange to swap to something more locally useful. But it's not employment, it's a volunteer thing with a small token of appreciation.
Last year I had way more volunteers than I actually had space for, so thank you all for being awesome. Since there are two courses concerned I can now take on up to 8 people. I will give priority to people who wanted to help before but were turned away since we had too many volunteers.
Feel free to ask questions in the comments, but if you actually want to sign up you need to interact with my work persona, so I'll ask you to PM me about arranging that. You're also welcome to pass the request on to anyone else who might be interested.
( details )
Other than doing some good for the world, what you get out of it is a £25 Amazon voucher. So in order to get paid you need to be in a position to receive and spend an Amazon voucher. We might possibly be able to acquire vouchers for other countries' versions of Amazon, or else I can informally arrange to swap to something more locally useful. But it's not employment, it's a volunteer thing with a small token of appreciation.
Last year I had way more volunteers than I actually had space for, so thank you all for being awesome. Since there are two courses concerned I can now take on up to 8 people. I will give priority to people who wanted to help before but were turned away since we had too many volunteers.
Feel free to ask questions in the comments, but if you actually want to sign up you need to interact with my work persona, so I'll ask you to PM me about arranging that. You're also welcome to pass the request on to anyone else who might be interested.
I made a thing!
Apr. 7th, 2020 12:38 pmSo, to break up the all pandemic all the time posts: I spent most of March getting my first big project at work over the line. I and my team have just released a FutureLearn MOOC. Behold: Antimicrobial Resistance in Bacterial Pathogens.
( showing off )
( showing off )
Beta readers?
Mar. 10th, 2020 10:12 amETA: You guys are amazing. I was really not expecting to get so many volunteers! I have more than enough people for now. I'm happy to add any additional names to the list for future opportunities. I can't add any more volunteers for this course, otherwise it would end up being all my friends which isn't great for diversity.
My awesome job involves creating free online courses about genomics. The first course I've been fully in charge of is about to go live, and it needs some final quality checks. It's quite exciting IMO: it's about using genomics to identify and avoid antibiotic resistance.
We need people who can put in a couple of hours in the next week, and just play around with the course and see if there are any obvious problems, whether that's technical issues like display problems for your particular hardware and software, or conceptual problems like confusing instructions or something that doesn't make sense. We are definitely not expecting any one individual to go through the whole course in detail, and we're not looking for copy editing or proofreading. I mean, if you have the sort of brain that can't help spotting typos, we don't mind reports of those, but we're mainly looking for something more general than that.
We want people from all backgrounds, so a mix of people who know something about microbiology and genomics, and people who have no idea. I will say that the course is fairly technical, though, so you probably don't want to volunteer if sciencey stuff is hateful or scary to you. We are especially happy to have beta readers who aren't completely fluent in English to be more representative of our target audience.
Other than doing some good for the world, what you get out of it is a £25 Amazon voucher. So in order to get paid you need to be in a position to receive and spend an Amazon voucher. We might possibly be able to acquire vouchers for other countries' versions of Amazon, or else I can informally arrange to swap to something more locally useful. But it's not employment, it's a volunteer thing with a small token of appreciation.
Feel free to ask questions in the comments, but if you actually want to sign up you need to interact with my work persona, so I'll ask you to PM me about arranging that. You're also welcome to pass the request on to anyone else who might be interested. The number of available slots is somewhat flexible, probably in the range of 3-5.
Now I actually have a contract in hand, I can talk about this online: I have the most exciting new job, starting on Monday. I'm going to be working in genomics education, as Education Manager for the online courses programme.
( details )
Heartfelt thanks to everybody who has supported me through the last few years of being uncertain of my career direction.
( details )
Heartfelt thanks to everybody who has supported me through the last few years of being uncertain of my career direction.
Who wants to give me careers advice?
Jul. 4th, 2019 09:16 pmSo two years ago I left my tenured academic job because it was making me miserable and requiring me to commute 300 miles a week. And I took up a fixed term job working on an interesting project about using modern teaching methods to make sure all students, including minorities, have a good experience at university. The project has come to an end, and it has been pretty much everything I hoped for; my CV is much more interesting and diverse now, and includes some leadership experience.
So I'm able to apply for a much wider range of jobs, and more senior jobs, now. And I'm sometimes getting shortlisted but so far nobody actually wants to offer me a job. So I'm going to be out of work from the end of the month, and I don't know what to do next.
( more details; mentions money )
So I'm able to apply for a much wider range of jobs, and more senior jobs, now. And I'm sometimes getting shortlisted but so far nobody actually wants to offer me a job. So I'm going to be out of work from the end of the month, and I don't know what to do next.
( more details; mentions money )
Cultural exchange
Sep. 4th, 2018 11:20 amOne of the things I love about my job is that when you're helping people to redesign their teaching they ask you for advice about all kinds of random things. This one I think I need to crowdsource:
My colleague is running an exchange trip where she's taking some of her students to Washington DC along with some students from a Southern US state. She wants to take some small gifts / prizes for the American students.
So my question to American or American-knowledgeable friends is, if you were an American college student, what small, inexpensive, transportable item would you be excited to receive from English visitors? Are there any (snack) foods you think of as excitingly and exotically British?
And to my compatriots, what should my colleague take that will seem like a nice souvenir of England or the UK? Particularly, can you think of anything that is typical of Cambridge the town but isn't about Cambridge Uni?
My colleague is running an exchange trip where she's taking some of her students to Washington DC along with some students from a Southern US state. She wants to take some small gifts / prizes for the American students.
So my question to American or American-knowledgeable friends is, if you were an American college student, what small, inexpensive, transportable item would you be excited to receive from English visitors? Are there any (snack) foods you think of as excitingly and exotically British?
And to my compatriots, what should my colleague take that will seem like a nice souvenir of England or the UK? Particularly, can you think of anything that is typical of Cambridge the town but isn't about Cambridge Uni?
Excel help?
Feb. 15th, 2018 10:21 amI have a spreadsheet with approx forty thousand rows. Around 6000 of them are irrelevant - they're mixed in with the rest, but are identifiable based on data in one of the columns. The data covers three years. The years are not recorded as proper dates, but as plain text saying things like
My task is that for each year, I need to count the unique values in one of the columns. This column contains only text, no blanks. It's not made out of meaningful English words, but serial numbers containing letters and digits. The values in each column are repeated anywhere from 1 to 60 times; I just want to know how many different serial numbers there are, not overall, but separately for each year.
( detail, with example )
Does anyone have any suggestions for how to approach this?
(The reason why I'm trying to wrangle this myself rather than delegating it to someone who has relevant expertise is, well, annoying work politics. But the fact remains that I need to do it.)
2015/16.My task is that for each year, I need to count the unique values in one of the columns. This column contains only text, no blanks. It's not made out of meaningful English words, but serial numbers containing letters and digits. The values in each column are repeated anywhere from 1 to 60 times; I just want to know how many different serial numbers there are, not overall, but separately for each year.
( detail, with example )
Does anyone have any suggestions for how to approach this?
(The reason why I'm trying to wrangle this myself rather than delegating it to someone who has relevant expertise is, well, annoying work politics. But the fact remains that I need to do it.)
I've never left a job before. I spent my 20s as a contract researcher, and when my project came to an end, I just... didn't work in that lab any more. So I didn't know how to give notice, how to do the tax paperwork, it was all completely new to me. Also, the people I've been working closely with for the past eight years were all actually sad to see me go and wanted to mark the rite of passage. That was new to me too, in a mostly touching but slightly bittersweet way.
( last days )
I started my new job the following Monday. I need to work out how much I should talk about that in detail here; for one thing it's looking to involve somewhat more blogging and social media presence as my professional persona than the old job did. Also I am still adjusting to living in Cambridge full time, which is probably another post, and I'm up to my eyes preparing for the High Holy Days beginning on Wednesday, so I am going to stick with posting about leaving rather than about arriving for now.
( last days )
I started my new job the following Monday. I need to work out how much I should talk about that in detail here; for one thing it's looking to involve somewhat more blogging and social media presence as my professional persona than the old job did. Also I am still adjusting to living in Cambridge full time, which is probably another post, and I'm up to my eyes preparing for the High Holy Days beginning on Wednesday, so I am going to stick with posting about leaving rather than about arriving for now.
Group work
Aug. 8th, 2017 03:18 pmI'm on a mission to redeem group work in education. I expect this to be controversial among many of my friends. So if I'm right and lots of you have terrible memories / experiences of being made to do bad group work, I invite you to comment here and tell me what was bad about it. Do you think it's just awful, or are there problems that might be fixed? I believe strongly that while it can be dire, it can also be great, or perhaps I might phrase it as, there are things that look like group work superficially but are actually great.
Because I'm on a mission this may turn into a more formal research survey at some point, but in that case I'll pose the question in a formal context with ethics and everything. Right now I'm just trying to gather some opinions and not just rely on my own ideas. Plus I am eye-deep in paperwork and I could do with some distraction, so do rant away.
Because I'm on a mission this may turn into a more formal research survey at some point, but in that case I'll pose the question in a formal context with ethics and everything. Right now I'm just trying to gather some opinions and not just rely on my own ideas. Plus I am eye-deep in paperwork and I could do with some distraction, so do rant away.
Throwing money at problems
Jan. 24th, 2017 09:22 pmThank you all so much for all the supportive comments on my post with squee about the awesome bar mitzvah. I feel really loved!
In another instance of my students being brilliant, I ran a session recently to introduce the first year medics to the concept of public health. We ended with an exercise which I found rather fun, so I thought I'd offer it to you to play:
A philanthropist is offering a grant of £250,000 to someone who can propose a way to improve the situation in a deprived housing estate. Population ~10K, annual healthcare spend roughly £100 million. The philanthropist wants to see improvements on a 30 year timescale, and wants the actual inhabitants to be involved in the project in a community building sort of way. What would you do?
( what the students thought of - you might want to have a go without reading this )
In another instance of my students being brilliant, I ran a session recently to introduce the first year medics to the concept of public health. We ended with an exercise which I found rather fun, so I thought I'd offer it to you to play:
A philanthropist is offering a grant of £250,000 to someone who can propose a way to improve the situation in a deprived housing estate. Population ~10K, annual healthcare spend roughly £100 million. The philanthropist wants to see improvements on a 30 year timescale, and wants the actual inhabitants to be involved in the project in a community building sort of way. What would you do?
( what the students thought of - you might want to have a go without reading this )
Young people today
Dec. 15th, 2016 01:40 pmI must say I really like teaching the Tumblr generation. They get a lot of flack from older pundits for caring too much about social justice and identity politics, but I just find it really refreshing working with people half my age who take gender and sexual diversity completely for granted, and have a sophisticated analysis of racism, and are constantly asking for the curriculum to be more globalized and more diverse.
( recent examples )
( recent examples )
Remember when we used to make posts to show off new icons? Well, I have the most adorable students ever: for an end-of-term present they made me a custom mug with a little cartoon of me teaching the class about p53. I asked the artist if I could use the cartoon as a profile pic, so here it is. (Click through to DW to see both the icon and the full-sized version.)
I am so very endeared by this. In fact, I squee'd so much when I saw it that my students declared me adorable, which I'm not sure is how it's supposed to work. But hey, I like 'adorable' better than 'intimidating'. (They've also given me a 100% positive evaluation this term, which is going to be very nice evidence to present at my appraisal next week.)
Full size original behind the cut - I think maybe it wants cropping a bit closer so it's just the picture of me, as you can't see the detail of the molecule or my speech bubble. I do love that my characteristic comment is "coolness", which I totally picked up from![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lethargic_man.
( pic of Liv teaching all about p53 )
I am so very endeared by this. In fact, I squee'd so much when I saw it that my students declared me adorable, which I'm not sure is how it's supposed to work. But hey, I like 'adorable' better than 'intimidating'. (They've also given me a 100% positive evaluation this term, which is going to be very nice evidence to present at my appraisal next week.)
Full size original behind the cut - I think maybe it wants cropping a bit closer so it's just the picture of me, as you can't see the detail of the molecule or my speech bubble. I do love that my characteristic comment is "coolness", which I totally picked up from
lethargic_man.( pic of Liv teaching all about p53 )
I ought to write a review of the year, I'll be glad to have done so when I look back at old journal entries in future. But I keep getting stuck because I have strange feelings about 2015. It feels like a year I will look back on and conclude that it marked the start of a change in my life direction, but that change hasn't happened quite yet.
2015 was the year of being in love, the year of establishing lots of new relationships. I mean, it was late in 2014 that I realized my friends were romantically interested in me andjack, and I think by Christmas 2014 I was unquestionably and intensely in love, but it was the months of 2015 when the new relationship energy coalesced into actually functioning as a quad. 2015 when all four of us told our parents and where applicable sibs about the relationship, when we started to have tentative discussions about some kind of future together, though we still don't know exactly what shape that will look like.
2015 was also my worst year at work. Not really horrible compared to a lot of what people experience in a bad workplace, but it's been difficult and at times I was really scared for the future. I had a 'not meeting expectations' appraisal in early summer, which is not a terrible disaster in the scheme of things, but it was the culmination of several months when I found myself really anxious and just somehow falling more and more behind and not keeping deadlines and that all spiralled a bit. Some of this was related to the fact that my senior PhD student has had a pretty troubled final year of her studies, and it's still not certain whether she'll come out of all this with a PhD. To recap, I have essentially two half-time jobs, one in the medical school and one in the research institute; the medical school have been very helpful and supportive and done all the right managerial things and given me lots of support to make sure that one bad quarter remains only a blip and chances to sort things out. The research institute not so much; they've switched unpredictably between ignoring me and leaving me to struggle, being actively hostile, and occasionally coming through with some random and not very systematic help.
I spent the summer clawing myself up out of the mess I'd got myself into. And of course starting from behind made that hard, and I was scared, and I suffered somewhat of a setback when my junior PhD student failed her "Progression", the process where the institute decides at the end of first year whether a student is suitable to go on and do a full PhD. She and I both worked really hard through the last few months of the year, and the medical school supported me by reducing my teaching and admin load so I could be there for my students. And this week she passed the resit panel, so as soon as that is formally ratified I can breathe much more easily again. So in many ways I can be proud of myself for extracting myself from a bad situation, but somewhere along the way I lost track of my love for research.
( so what now? )
So anyway, yes, that's 2015. I really don't know where I'll be by the end of this year, but I expect to look back on 2015 as a kind of watershed. Any comments or advice very much welcome!
2015 was the year of being in love, the year of establishing lots of new relationships. I mean, it was late in 2014 that I realized my friends were romantically interested in me and
jack, and I think by Christmas 2014 I was unquestionably and intensely in love, but it was the months of 2015 when the new relationship energy coalesced into actually functioning as a quad. 2015 when all four of us told our parents and where applicable sibs about the relationship, when we started to have tentative discussions about some kind of future together, though we still don't know exactly what shape that will look like.2015 was also my worst year at work. Not really horrible compared to a lot of what people experience in a bad workplace, but it's been difficult and at times I was really scared for the future. I had a 'not meeting expectations' appraisal in early summer, which is not a terrible disaster in the scheme of things, but it was the culmination of several months when I found myself really anxious and just somehow falling more and more behind and not keeping deadlines and that all spiralled a bit. Some of this was related to the fact that my senior PhD student has had a pretty troubled final year of her studies, and it's still not certain whether she'll come out of all this with a PhD. To recap, I have essentially two half-time jobs, one in the medical school and one in the research institute; the medical school have been very helpful and supportive and done all the right managerial things and given me lots of support to make sure that one bad quarter remains only a blip and chances to sort things out. The research institute not so much; they've switched unpredictably between ignoring me and leaving me to struggle, being actively hostile, and occasionally coming through with some random and not very systematic help.
I spent the summer clawing myself up out of the mess I'd got myself into. And of course starting from behind made that hard, and I was scared, and I suffered somewhat of a setback when my junior PhD student failed her "Progression", the process where the institute decides at the end of first year whether a student is suitable to go on and do a full PhD. She and I both worked really hard through the last few months of the year, and the medical school supported me by reducing my teaching and admin load so I could be there for my students. And this week she passed the resit panel, so as soon as that is formally ratified I can breathe much more easily again. So in many ways I can be proud of myself for extracting myself from a bad situation, but somewhere along the way I lost track of my love for research.
( so what now? )
So anyway, yes, that's 2015. I really don't know where I'll be by the end of this year, but I expect to look back on 2015 as a kind of watershed. Any comments or advice very much welcome!
