Chris Alexander
11th October, 2010
Just in case anyone missed it previously, today I am heading back to University for Part 3 of my 4-part (and 5-year) degree.
There are some things I will have to get used to, such as most people not responding within a few minutes to e-mails; being prepared for any e-mails from about 3pm on a Friday to 11am on a Monday to lecturers or staff not being responded to until some time on Monday (this is a generalisation, but I do have about 5 outstanding e-mails from the weekend yet to be dealt with); not getting paid regularly. There are some advantages though, such as 3 half days and not finishing much after 5pm on most of them.
Once again the timetabling people have immediately gone on my hit list for demonstrating their complete inability to do anything other than obey the (relatively stupid) algorithms that they use to formulate the timetables. This is exemplified by my timetable this morning having 2 lectures back-to-back for the same subject in rooms that are next to each other, and their positioning of a lecture at 9am and another at 5pm on the day I’m meant to be spending working on a project. I am told this is because the department can’t book an entire day out of the timetable for my project, so they can only do 10-1 and 2-5, hence why the lectures have turned up there.
The adventure I am finishing is my 15-month placement with Favorit / TweetMeme / DataSift; I won’t be around there much these days so if you are looking for information on that then I probably won’t be able to help that much.
But other than that all seems rosy, I had better get going.