New year, new challenges
It's a new year, and tomorrow I start a new job as Professor of Ethics and Games Technology at Staffordshire University. I'm extremely excited about this but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a bit nervous as well!
In the UK it's a big thing to become a professor; it's the thing you strive towards when you first start your academic career. I was asked on Mastodon what it takes to become a professor, and well, if you go internally within the university, you have to fill out a lot of paperwork that shows off your achievements over your career and apply to a panel of other professors within the university to see if you are worthy of the title. Or you can apply to another university that is looking for a professorial level role, fill out a lot of paperwork to apply to the job, go through an interview process and show a panel of other professors that you are worthy of the role. I did the latter, and so I'm moving away from De Montfort University to start in a new department in a new faculty in a new university!
Things I am looking forward to:
- Everyone I have spoken to seems to enjoy working in the department, so that's a great start!
- I'm really looking forward to settling into the culture of the department – part of my job role will be to help nurture the research side of things so I'm quite excited about meeting all my new colleagues and finding out what excites them about research. I am also very excited to fire up the writing muscles again and get back into my own research. I have a grant lurking about that needs to be refactored and sent in as well.
- I'm also looking forward to teaching a new set of students – I haven't taught in a games department before so this will be new and exciting. Normally I concentrate on soft skills like research methods, but here I'm also having to brush up on my programming so I can teach some of that which ... well, we'll have to see how that goes, I'm more an itch scratch programmer but I think there's some skill in being able to quickly hack stuff together as well as being super formal about it (though not perhaps for production level stuff... ;–)
- I'll have about an hour commute each way so I'm not going in every day. I made it clear from the outset that with my two small children I want to be able to be home for them as well; I was very pleased to hear that this would be fine as I think that there's a lot to be said for having senior level mums of small children in academia. But that hour commute will also be a good time to listen to audiobooks that I've been meaning to catch up on, both fiction and non-fiction.
- I'm also keen on keeping on with my media and science communication side of things. Critical views of technology need to be more visible, it's too easy to just take the press releases of tech companies as stated. I've become a bit lazy about updating here with my media appearances, so I hope to start that again too.
Ultimately I have a bit of imposter syndrome lurking about but my fantastic mentor Richard Hall told me to “Own it... be true, necessary and kind to all, including yourself” and I fully plan to. Thanks everyone for believing in me! I can do this!
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