I almost forgot!! This is a great day!!! I am no longer the Director of Studies of the Faculty of Science and Technology!!!
This job, over the last three years, has involved a wide range of academic admin/leadership activities including course quality assurance, course reporting, running a teaching and learning forum that has grown into an annual 1 day symposium/conference with invited speakers (including this year a keynote who can be seen on ABC TV quite often), providing opportunities for fellow academics to branch out into publishing teaching and learning (rather than scientific) research, acting as the assistant dean and lots of other things too. (Disclaimer: not one of these things did I do alone - always there were great people working with me)
Even though it has been a great learning experience where I got to work with a few amazing people and made new friends, and I got promoted twice in 2 years basically because of the work I was able to do in the job (Scott McCue likes to say that my job description was just the list of promotion selection criteria), I really didn't want to do this anymore. It was no longer as horrible as it originally was (I didn't have to reject unit outline changes made by fellow academics and feel their wrath) but it still had more downs than ups.
Best thing I learnt from this job: even when other people seem like they are your strong, confident and all knowing superiors, underneath they have just as many fears and concerns as you do - just perhaps different ones. This is useful to know... and if necessary exploit. :-)
That's a bit of a nasty way to finish the post...but there you go!
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