Goodness me, is it March already? I took February off from blogging to get properly settled back in Finland and my old job, but I guess it’s time to get back on the horse now. I find that not too much has changed here in my absence, which is comforting – same old office, same old people to have lunch and coffee with. Even my old laptop was still here on my return, which turned out to be a good thing since I had to wait a few days for my new computer to be installed, so at least I had something I could use to get some work done in the meantime. 

That was the situation until a few days ago, anyway. Since Friday I’ve been working from home as recommended by the university, and as of tomorrow all educational institutions from primary schools to universities are going to be closed by government decree in an effort to slow down the coronavirus epidemic. I don’t foresee that my own work is going to be dramatically affected by this, but the whole nation switching to distance learning for several weeks is going to be quite an experiment – and this is but one of 19 items on the list of actions presented by PM Marin in yesterday’s press conference. To implement the whole shebang, the government needs to activate emergency legislation intended to be invoked in cases of major threat or disaster, making it all seem particularly historic and momentous. 

The impending end of civilisation as we know it aside, it feels good to be back home. Over the past month and a half I’ve been noticing various little things that I like better here than in Ireland; for example, after two years of doing laundry in unrelenting Atlantic dampness, it seems almost like magic that I can reasonably expect my clothes to be dry the same day that I washed them, or the following morning at the latest! Getting a nice fresh salad with my lunch without having to pay extra for it is another thing I have a newfound appreciation for, although I suppose that says more about the options available at DCU than about Ireland in general. 

My work here is much more of a mixed bag than it was in Dublin, there are many more things now between which I need to split my time. Being able to concentrate on just one thing was certainly great, but there’s a lot to be said for variability as well. I’ve been doing some educational work for a change and finding it unexpectedly enjoyable – it helps a great deal that for now there’s no lecturing involved, since the course I’m partially responsible for is being run as an online course with pre-recorded lecture videos. I quite like preparing study materials and I think I’m not too shabby at it, but I much prefer it if somebody else does the presenting! 

Besides blogging, research has also temporarily taken a backseat in my professional life while I’ve been working on things that need to be finished more urgently, such as the final technical report of my MSCA fellowship. I also have quite a large number of conference papers to review in quite a short time, but once I’m done with those, there should be time in my calendar for working on papers of my own again. Besides the journal paper I’m already writing, submitting a short paper to CIKM 2020 is now on the table, but I’ll need to give some thought to whether I have enough unpublished material left for two papers or if I should stick with just the one. 

In the projects I’ve been assigned to, I spent the first few weeks mostly just studying documents and participating in meetings, but now that I have a decent understanding of what’s going on, I’ll need to start pulling my weight. The theme of one of the projects is actually not that far from what I did in Dublin and I’d be very interested to get to work on it for real, but the current funding is just for a preliminary investigation that will enable us to prepare a proposal for the actual research. It is refreshing, though, that for once I’m officially getting paid for grant writing – more often I find myself doing such things when I’m really supposed to be either working on something else or not working at all, and considering how often those efforts eventually come to nothing, this “small project to plan a bigger one” scheme certainly feels like an improvement.