Allocation done

One of the big jobs of the autumn is done! I have given all the students a dissertation topic. There were many of them: almost 200. And it was different from earlier years.

I let the students pick four topics off a list, and they have to all be topics by different members of staff. And then I have to somehow make it work. The complication with this is that we have many more members of staff per student on the physical side, so before you know it, the biological staff will have the maximum number of students, and then it becomes difficult. So far, staff members have been volunteering for supervising other people’s topics, but typically, the biologist volunteer for biological topics, and the non-biologist, obviously, for non-biological topics. And there's plenty of staff to supervise the non-biological topics! So that doesn't really help.

In the past it has always been the case that some non-biological staff just got considerably fewer dissertation students than pretty much all the biologists. That was not appreciated. I do compensate by giving people with few students more second marking to do, but that's not quite the same. And last year doing my PDR (and at another meeting), I had agreed with the head of school (HoS) and the director of teaching and learning (DTL) that we would do it differently. People whose own topics were not chosen very much just had to volunteer for a sufficient number of popular topics so that I could give them their fair share as well. And if they didn't like it, I would have to just make them. My authority might not do the job, but the combined authority of the HoS and the DTL would.

I started by first giving the traditionally unpopular people students. And then I worked my way up the popularity list. First giving everyone only their own topics, but later also the topics by others they had indicated they could supervise. And it quickly became clear that among the physicists, there were quite many who wouldn’t get to their fair share of students that way. So now the new rules came into force: I asked them to volunteer for more topics, especially biological ones. And most of them did. And I managed to get them their load of students. 

When I only had a handful of students left, I just assigned them to the staff who hadn’t volunteered enough. Job done! Almost. With 200 students on the course, there were bound to be mistakes in the final spreadsheet. 

The check indeed revealed some issues. A few students who had been allocated twice, two students who had fallen through the cracks. Things like that! And that then means some staff have too many or too few students. But I managed to sort that.

Then I sent it to the staff. With the students now distributed evenly I didn’t expect any complaints. But there was one member of staff who suggested a last minute change. Luckily, it was the easy type. I made that happen, and then it was ready to go to the students. 

I expect complaints! They always come. There are always students who say that not getting their first choice will negatively affect their career. And maybe it does! But if I give everyone their first choice, you get members of staff with tens of dissertation students, and that is unworkable. And those who want to keep their future in their own hands can design their own projects. If you start early enough, that is totally feasible! 

 

There are topics about eyespots on fish. Pic by David J. Stang