[Astronomy] Do the department shuffle.

Some interesting developments today at the St Andrews Physics department - it looks like we might all be moving offices soon.

One of the astronomy staff members actually has a panic button

like this on his office door! (Credit: locksucks.com)

Basically, the department is expanding somewhat. There are several staff members retiring or moving away, but the number of new staff members coming in is almost double that. So they need offices, and single occupancy offices at that. What’s more, one of the new staff members requires a low-vibration laboratory, something that we don’t currently have at the department.  So that’s going to be built in the quad, along with a new, larger clean-room that’s also desperately needed.  That building work does mean that we’ll lose the pond, and therefore the tradition of throwing newly minted PhDs into it, but some sacrifices have to made I suppose.

That’s not the end of it though. There are three or four members of staff who have recently been awarded large grants, and who will therefore be expanding their research groups with large numbers of postdocs and PhD students. They will also require offices.

In the end, what all of this means is that we astronomy students will have to give up our rather privileged office arrangements. Almost all of the Physics students are housed in large, open-plan offices, whereas quite a few of us are in two-person offices. So we’ll undoubtedly be moved downstairs to occupy open-plan ‘student farms’.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. Obviously its for the good of the department, as there are barely enough desks to go around and we don’t really deserve such nice working quarters. However I do think that it will have a negative effect on our teaching, as it will make it much harder for undergraduates to find us, and for us to hold impromptu tutorials or help sessions in our offices.

Not that I think any of this will apply to me. Given my goal of a June hand-in for my thesis, I think I’ll be up and out of the department before any of the changes are implemented!