End of timetabled teaching

I had two days of judging student posters in a row. The first day it was posters by the master students about their final projects, and the second day it was the turn of the students on the climate and climate change modules. These are two modules run together, but for both third and fourth year students; the third year students were doing a poster about something associated with sea level change, and the fourth year students were doing something with empirical orthogonal functions. They tended to run climate data sets through some software to see whether there were any particular modes in these data. One factor representing el Niño, for instance.

The first day, there was more variability, of course. These students do all kinds of different projects. It tends to be quite interesting. The students who are doing something you are familiar with peak your interest because it is interesting to see something new happening in the field you are interested in, but the posters by students who do something completely out of your line of sight tend to be quite interesting too. 

This year, for instance, there was a lady who was doing experimentation with hermit crabs. She wondered if a crab in a shell that is too small might be hesitant to exchange it for a better one if it never gets dark. Hermit crabs are vulnerable when they come out of their shell, so I can imagine they prefer to do it in the dark. But in coastal areas, darkness might not necessarily be available anymore. She also made sure to do experiments with crabs who had reason to believe there were predators around, and crabs who didn't. Interesting stuff!

Hermit crab. Pic by NOAA

With these two poster sessions out of the way, I have nothing timetabled anymore! If I now see students, it is either my own master student who is rounding off her project, or students I need to see for reasons of academic poor practice. So from now on it is marking, timetabling request, module evaluation, et cetera! Summer is nigh!