It is a job I slightly fear! Having to give all the students dissertation topic and a supervisor. It is a big job in the middle of terms when I have plenty of other things to do, and there is plenty of scope for frustration. It is a bit like a giant sudoku: if you make one mistake you can't just rectify it; you have to change a lot of other things as well. And some years, like last year, you have to deal with late surprises. Just when you think you are done, you might find out that people can't take on dissertation students for reasons of illness, scientific cruises, having quit, or any reason like that.
You also always end up disappointing people. The students all want their first choice, and the staff all want as few students as possible. And definitely not more students than someone else. Neither of that is possible. And I am fairly shruggish about upsetting people; I warn the students extensively that I can't possibly give everyone their first choice, so that I need to be mentally ready for getting any of their choices. And the number of students is unlikely to divisible by the number of staff, and then you always get different staff members with different numbers of students. I don't have much of a problem batting away colleagues who are a bit grumpy. And those with many students don't have to do much second marking!
This year I tried to do it in a slightly different way from usual. And it worked! It was quicker, and didn’t show signs of leading to any more errors than usual. I have published the results to both staff and students, and I have only received one complaint from a student who said I had accidentally assigned him a topic he hadn’t chosen in the first place. And he was right. I am just a flawed person like everybody else; it is not unexpected that at least one allocation goes wrong. But with some shuffling I could give him his second choice, which wasn’t bad.
With this out of the way, it will now be a bit of a while before this module demands an awful lot of my attention again. For now it can just tick along, with the work distributed over the entire staff. Good! Other jobs await…
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