Onwards with Welcome Week

Normally, the one big fat deadline you have in summer is the start of term! Not so this year. First there was the dissertation module. That needed a lot of prep! Getting the topics ready, getting the students to choose topics, allocating topics, getting the module website ready... and as soon as that was sort of ready (the website doesn't have any lectures on yet) it was time to quickly switch to the Welcome Week. That was approaching rapidly! And this year was a difficult one: the university had to keep adjusting to the COVID situation, so it had to make decisions rather late. And none of us had ever organised a COVID-compatible Welcome Week before. The good thing was that it was easy to have many more meetings with the Welcome Week organisers of the various schools than normal, as we're all sitting at our computers all day anyway, and just logging into a Teams meeting is a lot quicker than biking to Bangor. So we're doing our best! The bloke from Computer Science took the lead with regard to the associated websites. And he had faith his students wouldn't have a big problem with not having too much 'in person' time! Clichés exist for a reason. But as long as we can have 30 people outdoors we can do things with the students. And the Peer Guides are very good with things like online movie nights! Another cliché true: I wouldn't know how to go about it. I have never used Netflix! Too old, too non-TV-watching troglodyte. Anyway. I should really sort out my teaching, but welcome Week first! It's going to be one of those months...