It’s the week
before classes, and oh so busy! This time around for me, it’s full of meetings.
Monday was my
department retreat. It’s basically an all-day department meeting. Fortunately,
my department is super-functional and we have strong positive camaraderie even
when we don’t agree with each other on every issue. This means that we
accomplish a lot during the retreat, but it’s still a very tiring day. Our
retreat is off-campus, and we take a mid-day break for a low-key lunch while
enjoying a view of the nearby bay! Coffee and other snacks help keep us powered
throughout the day. Overall, we had good discussions and even took votes to
move certain processes forward.
Tuesday was my
catch-up day. I had syllabi drafts for the classes I’m teaching in this coming
semester. I was able to finalize these and then worked on constructing the
homework/problem sets for the first week of class. I also have slides ready for
the first day of class. There was also some administrative work since I’m
Associate Chair this year. Questions need to be answered. Forms need to be
signed. I don’t feel fully prepared for classes next week, but I’m in
reasonably good shape. It’s a good thing I checked my classrooms beforehand.
They were cold! I notified our building manager who then contacted Facilities.
I will check again tomorrow morning.
Wednesday and
Thursday (today) were mainly spent training new students in undergraduate research. I have three new students starting in my group: two sophomores
and a senior. For the sophomores, who are about to start organic chemistry, I’m
teaching them a little on-the-fly. I’m also being light on the math since they
won’t see physical chemistry until the following year. But that’s okay, they
can start research, and I hope this has positive synergy with their classes!
Last week I worked on updating the many tutorials and handouts that I use.
Since I’ve upgraded my software and moved all my projects to a new
high-performance computing cluster, there are new protocols.
I’ve also changed
some of the training elements. Previously I just had students play around with
a list of common commands in vi. This time around, I added a few exercises that
mirror the common things would need to do to edit their files. I think this
helped when we started on learning the computational software. Although the
software vendor has some tutorials for how to use the graphical-user-interface,
I made up a more focused cheat-sheet to get at some of the specific things my
students would have to do. Building transition states for quantum chemical
calculations can be tricky so I tried to be more explicitly clear how to do
this. My previous sessions took a day and a half. This time I asked the
students to commit to two full days. The last half-day was devoted to starting
their actual projects, after they had learned how to use the software working
on several prototypical examples. I think my changes helped the process, but
after two full days I’m beat.
On Friday
(tomorrow), I will be doing more catch-up in the morning (both administrative
and class prep). The afternoon is blocked off for a training session that
academic advisors must attend. Most years I teach a small general chemistry course
in the fall semester where all the students are new matriculating first-years
and they are also my academic advisees. The college has now linked such
classes into larger structures called living-learning communities (a current
buzzword in higher education). Tomorrow afternoon we’ll have the usual
informational sessions from the Dean’s office and Student Affairs. After that
there will be “breakout” groups into our designated communities involving
faculty, staff and student leaders; the purpose of this is mostly for brainstorming and event planning.
Then I have a long
weekend (thanks to Labor Day on Monday in the U.S.). I meet my new class of
advisees on Tuesday morning. Then, bright and early, on Wednesday morning,
classes begin! I’m on at 8am. Good thing I’m already used to waking up early
these last couple of weeks!
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