The dark days of January
Jan. 31st, 2026 03:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
procyonraccoonReturning back "home" has been something of a rude awakening following the long and generally pleasant (if very busy) trip around the US the first half of this month.
Starting with the prosaic: I had absolutely terrible jet lag this time around. After most of my recent trips to North America I've been able to switch back to the UK clock without missing a beat, but for almost the entirety of the first week back here I found myself waking up around 3am or earlier, and thus ending up tossing in bed or awake in the dead of night with nothing to do. By (last) Saturday I was waking up closer to 6am and I figured I was making progress, but then I made the catastrophic mistake of going for a "nap" around 8am that turned into a six-hour sleep in the middle of the day, and for the next few days I was now having the opposite form of jet lag - unable to get to sleep until 5am and finding it devastatingly hard to be up at reasonable working hours. By the middle of the following week I had mostly recovered. But there's been lots of other negative developments in the meantime that have left me in a rather dismayed state going into this weekend.
The first bit of bad news hit right away on the first day back at work: the grant application that I'd written a year ago was rejected, meaning that I'm now 0 for 4 on these grants over my career (which, statistically, are the "easiest" to get since they're comparatively modest in size). This was not extremely surprising in that I (a) was proposing on a somewhat niche topic this time, and (b) had very little time to prepare and refine the grant application, as last February was extraordinarily busy for me due to my decision to chair a major telescope committee. Still, the open possibility that I might get this grant was one of the conditional factors in not writing any applications elsewhere this year. Furthermore, the adverse impact is compounded by the fact that no one in my department was awarded one of these grants in this cycle, and given that things like travel, visitor, equipment, teaching relief, and student funding are all tied in various ways to how much grant income the department as a whole is bringing in, it is not hard to imagine that the long-term outlook at work is going to be one of decline: fewer PhD students, more Master's teaching, less support for travel and equipment, worse office conditions. (And that's before considering the other piece of bad news involving the department's biggest grant-supported project of all, which I'll come back to later.)
The second piece of dismaying news was the results of grading my the coursework and exam from my statistics class. Since the coursework was due in December and the exam took place in early January this was my first priority on returning, and it took up most of the first week. While I'm used to the results from this being pretty dismal, this year they were even more dismal than normal: the mean of the exam was 30%. I spend so much time and energy on this class (I do so much "above and beyond" stuff), yet it's clear that most students are not even retaining the very basics of the material. I don't feel that this is my fault (it is largely a reflection of the system-wide problem that UK universities see Master's programs as source of income and are perfectly happy to fill course rosters with highly underprepared students from abroad)... but it is demotivating anyway; while there are a handful of good students this year one really wonders if this small cohort is enough to justify me (and others!) devoting hundreds of hours of my time year on year. I still largely enjoy teaching and the material in general (although after 9 years this course is admittedly feeing a bit stagnant). But it's very far from the ideal of teaching.
On the maybe less serious side, there has been some drama afoot at the office. An awkward situation has developed involving the PhD student allocation process: the department head recently decided that each member of faculty is heretofore only allowed to supervise three PhD students at a time, a rule that in practice only affects a small cluster of people (including me) with three or more students already. I think it's a dumb rule and have said so (but left it at that). But another more junior faculty member that I talk to a lot in and out of work, and who has the same perspective as mine, has become highly bent out of shape over the question, and has been trying to recruit the existing students to his "cause" and in the process made quite a few supposedly inappropriate remarks on the issue (and, apparently, other issues). So I'm having to now navigate some weird fault lines that have sprung up over this. In the short term the main effect is that the post-work Friday pub outing has become fragmented with the students going to one place and a specific faculty circle to another venue. This has proven to not be entirely a bad thing since I can be a lot less guarded amongst a small group of people of my career stage versus at the huge 20+ person student/postdoc/staff mixed pub outings we did in the past. But it does seem like something has been lost, and there are going to be some complex social dynamics when the other faculty member returns from the trip to Japan he's currently on.
The next item is still a rumor, but it's a credible one as the writing has been on the wall for a while. Even since I arrived at this university (and from long before that), a group of my colleagues in the department has been trying to develop and eventually build a new 4-meter telescope optimized for time-domain astronomy (i.e. my research area, so it would be a very useful facility for me to use and has been one of the best reasons for me not to try to seek jobs elsewhere). They raised millions of pounds - some of it from our own university management who saw it as an investment, but also from the UK science funding council (STFC) and from a large institute in Spain - but it's not been quite enough to start construction, and STFC in particular is getting impatient that the committed money (which dates back more than five years) has been sitting unused for so long waiting for the project to come together. In September I went around asking the project development team what's really happening, and they said they were hoping to get China to buy-in but absent a clear decision on that by January the project would probably fold. I thought an announcement might be made at a big faculty meeting that happened the week I was away but the minutes that were sent around the following week contained nothing specific. However, one other faculty member told me today that she'd been told in fairly certain terms that the project had indeed been terminated. If that's true, it means even more dismal atmosphere at the department (there will be layoffs of the projects technical staff, etc.) and future threats to our semi-priveleged position within the university - you can bet the university management is going to ask questions why the (probable) million plus they spent on developing the project and committed to its future operations came to nothing.
On top of all of this is, of course, the steady drumbeat of bad news at the global scale, most of it originating from the odious regime in charge of my home country. A quasi-fascist police force mudering people in the streets. Threats to Denmark (of all places!) and the resulting corrosion of the trans-Atlantic alliance. Maybe this is a political nadir and will soon be the turning point for a backlash and restoration to some degree of normalcy (as 2020 proved to be). Or maybe this is just a portent of even worse things to come. I don't really know.
In the meantime, work has at least returned to a manageable state for a while. Teaching is done, grading is done, and other than one relatively straightforward proposal deadline next week there are no major deadlines to worry about. This winter lull has been a feature of many of my years here (although not last year, which was insanely busy on account of the JWST panel I volunteered to serve on) and it will last a few weeks yet. So far I've mostly been using it to play catch-up on a bunch of minor tasks, and to do a little bit of pre-planning for what is likely to be a complicated spring travel schedule. Perhaps I should be doing something more significant with my time. As has been the dilemma for years, I never know whether I should be working even harder to help me crack through this barrier that has continued to frustrate my career and life goals for almost a decade... or if I should just accept what life has dealt at this point and work to satisfy the basic requirements of the job and no more. It's hard to know, but it's becoming hard to envision what my future or even my goals are at this point in general. But for today, at least, I'm probably going to take the time to try and relax.
Starting with the prosaic: I had absolutely terrible jet lag this time around. After most of my recent trips to North America I've been able to switch back to the UK clock without missing a beat, but for almost the entirety of the first week back here I found myself waking up around 3am or earlier, and thus ending up tossing in bed or awake in the dead of night with nothing to do. By (last) Saturday I was waking up closer to 6am and I figured I was making progress, but then I made the catastrophic mistake of going for a "nap" around 8am that turned into a six-hour sleep in the middle of the day, and for the next few days I was now having the opposite form of jet lag - unable to get to sleep until 5am and finding it devastatingly hard to be up at reasonable working hours. By the middle of the following week I had mostly recovered. But there's been lots of other negative developments in the meantime that have left me in a rather dismayed state going into this weekend.
The first bit of bad news hit right away on the first day back at work: the grant application that I'd written a year ago was rejected, meaning that I'm now 0 for 4 on these grants over my career (which, statistically, are the "easiest" to get since they're comparatively modest in size). This was not extremely surprising in that I (a) was proposing on a somewhat niche topic this time, and (b) had very little time to prepare and refine the grant application, as last February was extraordinarily busy for me due to my decision to chair a major telescope committee. Still, the open possibility that I might get this grant was one of the conditional factors in not writing any applications elsewhere this year. Furthermore, the adverse impact is compounded by the fact that no one in my department was awarded one of these grants in this cycle, and given that things like travel, visitor, equipment, teaching relief, and student funding are all tied in various ways to how much grant income the department as a whole is bringing in, it is not hard to imagine that the long-term outlook at work is going to be one of decline: fewer PhD students, more Master's teaching, less support for travel and equipment, worse office conditions. (And that's before considering the other piece of bad news involving the department's biggest grant-supported project of all, which I'll come back to later.)
The second piece of dismaying news was the results of grading my the coursework and exam from my statistics class. Since the coursework was due in December and the exam took place in early January this was my first priority on returning, and it took up most of the first week. While I'm used to the results from this being pretty dismal, this year they were even more dismal than normal: the mean of the exam was 30%. I spend so much time and energy on this class (I do so much "above and beyond" stuff), yet it's clear that most students are not even retaining the very basics of the material. I don't feel that this is my fault (it is largely a reflection of the system-wide problem that UK universities see Master's programs as source of income and are perfectly happy to fill course rosters with highly underprepared students from abroad)... but it is demotivating anyway; while there are a handful of good students this year one really wonders if this small cohort is enough to justify me (and others!) devoting hundreds of hours of my time year on year. I still largely enjoy teaching and the material in general (although after 9 years this course is admittedly feeing a bit stagnant). But it's very far from the ideal of teaching.
On the maybe less serious side, there has been some drama afoot at the office. An awkward situation has developed involving the PhD student allocation process: the department head recently decided that each member of faculty is heretofore only allowed to supervise three PhD students at a time, a rule that in practice only affects a small cluster of people (including me) with three or more students already. I think it's a dumb rule and have said so (but left it at that). But another more junior faculty member that I talk to a lot in and out of work, and who has the same perspective as mine, has become highly bent out of shape over the question, and has been trying to recruit the existing students to his "cause" and in the process made quite a few supposedly inappropriate remarks on the issue (and, apparently, other issues). So I'm having to now navigate some weird fault lines that have sprung up over this. In the short term the main effect is that the post-work Friday pub outing has become fragmented with the students going to one place and a specific faculty circle to another venue. This has proven to not be entirely a bad thing since I can be a lot less guarded amongst a small group of people of my career stage versus at the huge 20+ person student/postdoc/staff mixed pub outings we did in the past. But it does seem like something has been lost, and there are going to be some complex social dynamics when the other faculty member returns from the trip to Japan he's currently on.
The next item is still a rumor, but it's a credible one as the writing has been on the wall for a while. Even since I arrived at this university (and from long before that), a group of my colleagues in the department has been trying to develop and eventually build a new 4-meter telescope optimized for time-domain astronomy (i.e. my research area, so it would be a very useful facility for me to use and has been one of the best reasons for me not to try to seek jobs elsewhere). They raised millions of pounds - some of it from our own university management who saw it as an investment, but also from the UK science funding council (STFC) and from a large institute in Spain - but it's not been quite enough to start construction, and STFC in particular is getting impatient that the committed money (which dates back more than five years) has been sitting unused for so long waiting for the project to come together. In September I went around asking the project development team what's really happening, and they said they were hoping to get China to buy-in but absent a clear decision on that by January the project would probably fold. I thought an announcement might be made at a big faculty meeting that happened the week I was away but the minutes that were sent around the following week contained nothing specific. However, one other faculty member told me today that she'd been told in fairly certain terms that the project had indeed been terminated. If that's true, it means even more dismal atmosphere at the department (there will be layoffs of the projects technical staff, etc.) and future threats to our semi-priveleged position within the university - you can bet the university management is going to ask questions why the (probable) million plus they spent on developing the project and committed to its future operations came to nothing.
On top of all of this is, of course, the steady drumbeat of bad news at the global scale, most of it originating from the odious regime in charge of my home country. A quasi-fascist police force mudering people in the streets. Threats to Denmark (of all places!) and the resulting corrosion of the trans-Atlantic alliance. Maybe this is a political nadir and will soon be the turning point for a backlash and restoration to some degree of normalcy (as 2020 proved to be). Or maybe this is just a portent of even worse things to come. I don't really know.
In the meantime, work has at least returned to a manageable state for a while. Teaching is done, grading is done, and other than one relatively straightforward proposal deadline next week there are no major deadlines to worry about. This winter lull has been a feature of many of my years here (although not last year, which was insanely busy on account of the JWST panel I volunteered to serve on) and it will last a few weeks yet. So far I've mostly been using it to play catch-up on a bunch of minor tasks, and to do a little bit of pre-planning for what is likely to be a complicated spring travel schedule. Perhaps I should be doing something more significant with my time. As has been the dilemma for years, I never know whether I should be working even harder to help me crack through this barrier that has continued to frustrate my career and life goals for almost a decade... or if I should just accept what life has dealt at this point and work to satisfy the basic requirements of the job and no more. It's hard to know, but it's becoming hard to envision what my future or even my goals are at this point in general. But for today, at least, I'm probably going to take the time to try and relax.
