After my PhD and two post-doc contracts, I thought it was about time that I got a ‘proper job’ (read: a job that isn’t a time-limited contract where you’re not really an academic you’re ‘just’ a researcher). As I have often had to explain to my bemused parents, this generally means teaching, being a Lecturer, and giving up ~60% of your working time to non-research activities (like the aforementioned teaching).

This month I start a new job. After a short stint as Lecturer at the University of Derby, I am now an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham. It’s been nice to come back home to the Midlands, to have a slightly more intuitive sense of where different towns and cities are, but I also feel slightly out of place from being away for so long.

so here you are, installed…

This month saw my second first week as a new lecturer, and it still feels like there’s a lot that I don’t know. Not that I didn’t learn anything the first time around, but maybe I wasn’t in my previous job long enough to have learnt how to do all the parts of the job. Add that to the usual things with a new job: registering for email addresses, IT systems, finding your way around the building, etc; its been a good start, but there are still ‘new job admin’ things on my todo list.

For me, this is another partial installation. I have my space, and crucially a key, but my desk is in a (thankfully empty) hot-desking room. For the previous job, it took longer to get a desk and a key…

I’m not sure how things go in other fields, but a lot of Computer Science departments seem to be in the middle of recruiting to cover large numbers of students, but have no where to put the people. It’s not exclusively impacting new academics like me; I’ve seen this even for more senior academics, who are also sharing offices. This is tricky, because I find that I need the quiet and space of being on my own to read and write well. But we’ll see what happens.

There are benefits to having a team sharing an office. The group I shared my office with during my time at Liverpool was great: we got on well, we were all working on closely related things so it gave a sense of comradeship to the place, and (crucially) no one was overly loud.

The Trouble with Teaching

I keep thinking that there is a cliff-edge between research jobs and lecturing (teaching and research) jobs. This is not a unique observation, but it’s something that I’ve only recently had first-hand experience of.

If you’re doing research as a lecturer, then much of it is the same as when you were doing research during post-doc research jobs. You are forming ideas, talking to collaborators, doing work, and writing it up for publication. But as I said earlier, you are usually giving up about 60% of your research time to become a lecturer and it’s the tasks that fill this 60% that are the problem.

UK PhD students and post-docs often don’t have opportunities to teach, and if they do they often don’t have the time to do it. During my PhD, I was a teaching assistant for a few modules, meaning that I was assisting the lecturer deliver the practical session and/or with marking. This was paid, which was very useful, but I always had the worry that it was taking time from my PhD work. In the UK, you usually only get three years of funding for a PhD. When it runs out you are usually allowed another year to ‘write up’, but there is no funding for that year. It is terrifying, so time is precious.

As a post-doc, I did no teaching work within the university. As far as I understand it, this is often a stipulation of the contracts for researchers funded by projects so that universities can’t use the research money to prop up teaching by making the post-docs help out.

The upshot of these situations is that the gap between doing some post-doc jobs and getting a job as a lecturer feels very large. There are bits of experiences that you can draw on to give evidence that you would be good at lecturing, but rarely can you point at things in the post-doc jobs you’ve done and say ‘this shows me doing exactly what this job is’. I find this odd, and disconcerting. Also, surely this means that recruiting new lecturing staff is often about gambling on a person’s potential. Then again, I suppose that was the case when I was applying for my PhD, but perhaps that feels different because it was a studentship rather than a job.

Post-Post Doc

I think the crucial thing now is to make some plans and plough on with them, using the time I’ve been given. I have a few project proposals that I want to work up and submit, three(ish) papers that are in the works, all the admin and training needed for the new job, and my workshop. The Fifth International Workshop on Formal Methods for Autonomous Systems (FMAS 2023) is next month; it takes up a lot of time, but it is probably the one thing in my work life that I’m actually proud of. Lots to do. The road goes ever on and one…