Happy 2023, I guess? I know it’s a bit ridiculous to be wishing that when we’re more than halfway into February already, but it is my first blog post of the year – I checked. In my defence, the beginning of the year has been pretty much exactly as intense as I feared it would be, with me trying my best to balance between my commitments to the university and the theatre. The first week of January was the absolute worst: I returned to work immediately after New Year, and that week we had rehearsals every night from Monday to Thursday. I was still suffering from the problem of sleeping badly after them, so the inevitable result was me being utterly knackered by Friday, which fortunately was a bank holiday, giving me a chance to recover before two more rehearsals on Saturday.

The following week we had dress rehearsals from Monday to Wednesday, Thursday night off and then the first two performances on Friday and Saturday. In terms of effort, it was hardly any easier than the previous week, but the thrill of the opening night more than made up for it all. After the first show we celebrated with some bubbly and they even gave flowers to all of us chorus members; sadly, mine suffered rather heavy damage on the way home, which involved a pit stop in a crowded bar that I ended up leaving before I even had a chance to order myself a drink, but I was able to salvage the essential part of the poor abused plant and keep it looking nice for a good week.

After opening week, things got considerably less hectic, since there were no more rehearsals, just performances – first three per week, then down to two for the last couple of weeks. This weekend’s the final one, so around 4pm on Saturday the curtain will close on our production of The Magic Flute for the last time. All 15 performances sold out, and all the reviews I’ve seen have been very positive, so I guess it’s safe to say we’ve had a successful run! It’s been a wonderful experience for me personally as well, but I can’t deny that toward the end it has begun to feel more and more like work that I’m not getting paid for and that has made me put my other hobbies (not to mention my social life) largely on hold for quite a while. I’m very much looking forward to next Friday and my first commitment-free weekend of the year.

The big thing at work right now is evaluating applications to international M.Sc. degree programmes. This is the first time I’m involved in the process, and boy is it a trudge and a half. Sure, it’s interesting to get a sneak peek at some of the new students who may be joining us from around the world next autumn, but the work itself is first tedious, crawling through the mass of application documents to identify the most promising candidates, and then stress-inducing, doing interviews with each of them. I recently had a chat about this with a friend of mine who’s been in the IT consulting business for many years and interviewed his share of job applicants, and he said he finds interviews stressful because he can tell that the other person is nervous, so then he empathises with them and starts to feel their discomfort. Me being me, I get stressed about talking to new people even without that extra factor, so I’m going to be extremely glad once I’m done with my share of the interviews.

Something that’s turned out to be a blessing here is the Bookings app in Microsoft 365. This has been very helpful in scheduling the interviews: you just specify the times when you are available, make sure your calendar is up to date with your other appointments so you don’t get double bookings, and then send a link to the booking page to the people you want to invite and let them pick a time that works for them. Apparently in the past this has been done by tentatively selecting a date and time for each candidate, emailing it to them and asking them to email back with suggestions if the proposed time doesn’t suit them; I certainly don’t relish the idea of having that kind of administrative overhead on top of the actual evaluation work, even though it might have helped get the interviews spaced out more evenly and efficiently.

As usual, there’s no need to worry about running out of work to do in the spring either: the start of period IV is just three full weeks away, and with that comes the start of another run of the AI ethics course. I’ll count myself lucky if it doesn’t take up even more of my time than before; I’m the sole responsible teacher now, but on the other hand I will have a teaching assistant, and I also have some ideas for streamlining the evaluation of course assignments to make it less of a burden. Another thing to think about is my stance on ChatGPT and its ilk; certainly I’m going to discuss the technology and its implications in my lectures, but I’ll also need to decide what to do about the possibility of students using it to generate text for their assignment submissions. I’m leaning toward embracing it rather than discouraging or outright banning it – I don’t know how I’d enforce such a ban anyway – but if I go there, it’s not exactly trivial to come up with assignments that give everyone an equal opportunity to exploit the technology and demonstrate their learning to me.