Ho ho ho

Term is over so we academics should all be sitting back and waiting for Christmas, right? Not a bit of it; hence the lack of much blogging recently. At the moment the colleges are full of students who are applying for admission in October 2008 (or for deferred entry in 2009). Our current first-years have only just started and already we need to think about the next year's intake. I find the whole process a lot of hard work, and pretty stressful. Not, I suppose, as stressful as the candidates find it. But all the same, there are some big decisions to be made and we try to make them fairly and well.

That's not all. For our Faculty, this is the time of year when we begin to set exam papers for the summer. It's a long and baroque process, with all sorts of complicated discussions about formats and fonts and markbooks and workbooks and candidates from other courses and the like. One of the hardest parts of the job, in fact, is moving between the various different teaching, Faculty, college, research, and publication tasks that we each take on. I can't juggle and I'm only just able to manage this working equivalent.

But there are some things to smile about too. Like: www.elfyourself.com (8 new elves per second, apparently...). Or the interesting and often very bright students we get to interview. Or finding out that YouTube has footage of perhaps the best thing that Socrates ever did.