[Astronomy] Semester Round-up

Today was the last day of the autumn semester here at the University of St Andrews. It’s been an interesting one for the most part, and I want to take a quick retrospective look at it today.

Hooray, it's the end of semester! (Credit: harringayonline.com)

From a teaching point of view it’s been ok, but not brilliant for me. My tutorial group this year have been fantastic for the most part, with very little encouragement needed from my end for them to participate in the tutorials and pipe up with questions and answers. I don’t think I’ll be getting such great feedback as a tutor this year, partly because they were in much better shape than my groups last year and didn’t need extra sessions or help as much. I did get a box of beer as a thank you from a couple of my students though, which was really nice and completely unexpected.

Labs also weren’t that bad, although we struggled a bit after the first experiment with late book hand ins. After that it got much better for the most part, although we did have a couple of students fail to get the required grades, mostly owing to consistent late penalties being applied. I find that incredibly frustrating, but what can you do?

Organisation wise though, the module was worse than last year, and it felt like we had less support from the module coordinator. There was also a big problem with one of the other staff members getting involved and changing the labs around at very short notice. We’ll definitely be giving feedback to the staff this year.

More generally, I got to go observing again, which was brilliant, got pretty far with some of my thesis chapters, and even got my third paper published (Check the date on this). So it’s been rather productive from an academic standpoint. The planetarium has also been incredibly busy, and I’ve helped to train up some new demonstrators and begun the process to hand-over the coordinator job. Finally, I squeaked in a couple of applications at the end of November, which marked the start of my post-PhD job search.

The semester flew by really, but by the end I really needed a break. Thankfully I’ve now got a couple of weeks at my parents for Christmas, which I’m really looking forward to. But roll on semester 2; I’m interested to see what’s in store.