60 seconds with me

The University issues a weekly online staff bulletin. And one of the standard items in it is "60 seconds with…" Every week, someone is featured who answers a number of standard questions.

The chair of the Athena Swan committee wanted as many Committee members as possible to feature in that. So she asked me if I was willing to join in. And I was. 

I had a look at the questions, and had a stab at them. The first questions were about Athena Swan. And there was one about the three priorities in my job. I skipped that one! Was I supposed to talk about my lecturing or Athena Swan? Would I not descend into platitudes? You're not expected to answer all of them, anyway. After all, it is called "60 seconds with" so you have to be brief. And then later there are some less applied questions.

I filled it all out, I'm got feedback; I was writing too much! Sixty seconds, after all. So I made my text a bit more concise, and booted another question out entirely. One question I really wanted to keep was the question about what I wanted to put in room 101. I really wanted to bring up climate somewhere! And that's where it fit.

I was also asked to explain a bit more about my dream dinner companion. I suppose not everybody keeps track of all the Vikings that have roamed the Earth. But with some extra explanation there, and the cutting out text elsewhere, it was good to go. And I used a cropped version of a race picture to go with it.

The day it would come out I received a message from a colleague. She said the mini interview had made her laugh! That was a bit unexpected; was it out yet? The next email I received was the actual Staff Bulletin. My colleague must have had that one a few minutes before me, for some reason. I wasn't quite sure what was so funny about it.

Marjan also commented on it. She said she was glad to see someone featured that she actually knew! But later, after a meeting, another colleague commended; he said that he had chuckled at the fact I had to put the actual government in room 101, and got away with that. I had to admit I hadn't considered the possibility that the University might want to censor something like that! But yes, they sure might. Maybe that was also my other colleague’s cause for amusement!

Altogether it was alright! I'm always happy to make people smile by dissing the Tories. Even more so when the whole purpose of doing so is to draw attention to the fight for gender equality, what was what this all started with. A successful mission, I would say…

The earlier questions (that didn't fit in the screenshot) were about Athena Swan