It’s the Easter vacation, so I thought I would write a diary outlining what I do these days when I’m not teaching. Well, the three days of the week that I am working, anyway – the university is closed from Thursday for a week.

Monday

Today, I had three things planned – give feedback on a draft dissertation chapter, attend the meeting to decide on the recipients of the Social History Society Small Grants, and start grading the dissertations that have come in. I started the day by clearing my inbox – replying; to some emails and organising a call with procurement so that they could pay for my booking for the Social History Society Conference through my research funding. After that, I set up the spreadsheet for the SHS Grants, so that I could keep track of who was a yes and who was a no. Then I logged into the bookings system and asked procurement to organise my hotel for an upcoming research trip to Oxford. Finally, I made a start on the draft chapter, three quarters of an hour later than I intended.

Giving feedback on draft chapters is slow – much slower than simply marking a dissertation. I correct all sorts of things, from apostrophes and commas through sentence structure, ideas, use of secondary and primary sources, right up to overall structure. It was the overall structure that took my time today – there was a bit of repetition and I think I managed to move the content around in order to get rid of it. But it took a long time. I did half an hour before the SHS grant meeting, and several more hours afterwards.

It took use about an hour and a half to go through all the applications for the SHS grants. We had a lot this time round, and decided to make a larger number of smaller grants to help facilitate a wide range of projects. When I had finished the draft chapter feedback and sent it off to the author, I sent out all the emails to the applicants, and updated our spreadsheet. I now need to remember to chase the recipients of the last round of grants for their reports.

I never got to the dissertations themselves. By the time I had finished the rest of my work, it was 4pm and I was waiting for the call from procurement. It’s not ideal to have to break off reading a dissertation at someone else’s will, so I decided to leave them for tomorrow and go through The Historian inbox for the Historical Association. We have a new issue on the Silk Road about to go for layout, so there were some things to sort out there. There were a couple of submissions to deal with, which I had to leave to one side for now as they will take a bit longer to read, and there was the inaugural ‘Ask The Historian’ column to put together.

By this stage I was wondering what had happened to the call from procurement, but it turned out that unlike last time, when someone called me, I was expected to call them. I realised just in time to get it in before 5pm.

Tuesday

There were only two things I wanted to do today – the dissertation marking and starting to read the PhD thesis that I am examine for Birkbeck in April. I did get through the dissertation marking relatively quickly, as of the five I should have been marking, two have got extensions so there were only 3 to do. Over lunch I went to someone online parent appointments for my son’s college, and then I tried to settle down to the PhD. Unfortunately, there were some emails that got in the way, and I didn’t get to the PhD until mid afternoon. I read the introduction, but didn’t get any further. I’m going to leave it until after Easter now…

Wednesday

Today, I went into the office. This meant that I could have a quick swim in the sports centre pool on the way in. I was supposed to be meeting a colleague for lunch to discuss plans to commemorate the university’s 60th anniversary, but late yesterday he’d sent an email asking if we could reschedule for a coffee at 11.30. By the time I found the email at 11.15, I had already arranged to call another colleague on the China campus, so I never got the brew – we have rescheduled for early April. I was also planning to label the files in my file drawer, but I never got that far either…

So what did I do? I spent half an hour talking to Louis, the SHS Administrator, Ali, about SHS business, and another quarter of an hour or so discussing Exams Officer stuff with the Part II administrator. I then spent half an hour on the phone to my fiend (long term readers of the blog might remember him, but I don’t think he’s popped up on here for a while!) discussing research and teaching stuff.

At 11.15 I finally made it into my emails. Ali and I called our colleague in China and spent a profitable half hour discussing academic probation for students and coming up with a departmental policy for what it should look like. So, not on my plan for the day but useful nonetheless. I then popped out to get some lunch, and during the afternoon worked on a draft essay, looking for relevant material on the library website and editing the writing.

Now

It’s now Friday. Yesterday was a university closure day, which I mainly spent doing absolutely nothing, ordering patterns for Tudor costumes and talking to the vet on the phone about a terminally ill Guinea pig… Today I might go to the travel agent, I might see if I can get to Beacon Fell for the bacon butty I was promised a week ago, and I might start clearing up the garden… but first, breakfast.