...And not a drop to drink. Obviously, since you can't drink marking.
Yes, we are at the end not just of term, but the academic year, and that means vast amounts of marking. Level 2 projects and a raft of Level 3 and 4 dissertations across engineering and Product Design. Time consuming, but fascinating. Dissertations can be a mixed bag: some are badly written, or just not very interesting; others are really interesting pieces of work that get on for the sort of thing you'd hope for from a PhD Student. One of the mixed blessings is that you don't just mark within your specialism, and that means digging out your knowledge of thermodynamics and fluid mechanics. It's a good way of keeping your hand in, and finding out what's going on.
And on top of that, four grant proposals with short deadlines are coming up - a tight turnaround, but I always take the view with these things that even if you can't do the best job with them, or don't manage to get the proposal together in the end, it's valuable if it just encourages you to keep your links in contact, and push your ideas forwards.
We've been finalising PSAT, which has now had one unit survive PAT testing, and be ready to roll out into schools, with four more units waiting for us to apply the finishing touches. Which I will once all the marking is out of the way! Still, it's good to have reached this point.
In PhD-related news, things have been moving on apace. Oscar Giles has passed his PhD on measuring interceptive timing in children, following a marathon four-and-a-half-hour viva (great work, Oscar!). Anne-Marie Moore has completed her corrections and is ready to graduate this summer. And we welcome a new PhD Student, Awais Hafeez into PACLab, who will be feeding into our work on arm-movement and rehabilitation.
Coming up, June promises to be an exciting time (over and above the aforementioned deadlines). We have the third Tracking People workshop, at which I will be giving a presentation and running a workshop using some of the speculative design methods I've been champing at the bit to try. We also have the grand finale of the Augmenting the Body Sadler Seminar series in which Margrit Shildrick will return to Leeds to further our discussions on cyborgs and where bodies begin and end.
On top of that, I have two undergraduate summer students looking at expanding the use of Pete Culmer's (among others!) MagOne force sensor into FATKAT and postural support seating. I can't wait: there's loads to get stuck into - but first, better finish up that marking, eh?
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