In this ongoing image-based narrative of my life I feel like occasionally showing that I earn my right to come to all these nice places, so here’s a picture taken at the staff development workshop I helped run today at UiT (the Arctic University of Tromsø, and there’s a cool name for an educational institution). I think I managed to provoke these people to get thinking…. which is what I do for a living, in the end.
It was time today for the monthly staff development workshop that I organise. Why the Lego? Well, ask the speaker… but the talk was about creative innovation, so always good to have some toys to spark interest. I always try to do something creative each day — the proof has played out over the last five-and-three-quarter years on here.
This is the job… You find some time to do a bit of research, write it up, hope someone reads it. You go to as many conferences as your limited travel budget will stretch to, you network a bit, you publish a book and try to promote it. You eventually get invited to some other conference where you meet a nice Catalan academic who works in Norway and you write a proposal and eventually get an invite to do the work and suddenly you’re quite big in Scandinavia (or at least, among a very select audience of Scandinavians). It’s quite hard work sometimes but it’s probably better than being, say, a traffic warden.
Being 42 