Presentations-tastic

The blissful Easter break ended, and immediately things kicked into higher gear. I immediately had to deal with a lot of students who had questions about upcoming presentations. The second year is doing their presentations the first week back on campus, and the third year the week after that. I had some 10 students from the second year, and that kept me busy enough. Quite a lot of them got in touch with questions or issues! And that was only the beginning. The students from the third year, for whom there is more at stake, were also ramping up the communications. The problem with that is, that I have business with every single one of them.

I of course also have other things to do. I have fieldwork to prepare, work to mark, academic poor practice two deal with. Just to name a few things. But these presentations take up a lot of time, especially the dissertation presentations! And I wasn't going to get much time to do that. The first day back on campus I was in the field, and the second day on campus I had the aforementioned presentations by the second years. They have to be double marked, so you get double the number of students. That means you're marking presentations most of the day.

In addition to these oral presentations, there were two cohorts of master students doing poster presentations in the same week. That took up a fair amount of time as well.

The dissertation presentations don't only lead to me getting bombarded with emails. I have to make sure all the staff know exactly what they need to do! Which means I really have to prepare a mountain of paperwork. Some of that I will have to do at the last minute; that can only be done after the student have submitted their files. Unfortunately, that will be Friday noon, in the presentation start 9 am on Monday. I should try to make sure I have a bit more time between these two things next year!

The week before these presentations always feels busy, but somehow it feels worse this year. And I'm only writing this before the weekend! There is no way I can get everything finished by Friday end of play. So I will be in the office on Saturday. And after the presentations I have to get my timetabling requests for next year sorted, as the deadline is coming up. And I still have several academic integrity cases to deal with. I really look forward to the end of term now! Then I should be able to sigh a breath of relief…