WARNING: THIS BLOG IS BANNED ON MAYNOOTH UNIVERSITY CAMPUS
I’m well and truly back from sabbatical: I spent most of Friday filling in forms.
It is now just two weeks before teaching resumes after the summer break. To add even more excitement to this, the building housing the rooms in which half of my scheduled lectures (and many of those of my colleagues) are to take place is still a construction site. The work was supposed to be completed by September 1st. Will the rooms be ready by September 23rd? I have no idea. What will we do if they’re not? I have no idea. We’ll just have to wait and see.
I still have the blackboard in my study that I used to give remote lectures during pandemic times. I wonder if I’ll be using it again? I thought this time round we would have a relatively smooth introduction to term, as opposed to the mad scramble caused in previous years by delayed Leaving Certificate results, but…
Among the new arrivals will be a cohort of students on our MSc in Theoretical Physics and Mathematics. I understand we have approximately 9 students which is not a bad start for a new postgraduate course. That means we’ll have to think up some projects for them to do. I might do that this afternoon, in fact.
Anyway, this coming week we have the first Departmental Meeting of the (new) Department of Physics. Hopefully we might find out how the merger is actually meant to work in practice. The day after that we meet the new (Interim) Dean of the Faculty of Science & Engineering. Incidentally the President of Maynooth University made this appointment in a way that is in direct conflict with the Statutes of the University. That’s par for the course at Maynooth these days, I’m afraid, as is the censorship of this blog.
This time next week we’ll be looking ahead to Welcome Week when the new students arrive and have a chance to look around and choose their modules. The local Facebook page is alive with messages from desperate students and their parents looking for accommodation in or near Maynooth. The University likes to boast about how many more students it will have this year, but not a thought is given to where they will live. The strain of having to travel long distances to campus, combined with the high cost of living necessitating many students to take on more-or-less full time employment, looks likely to ensure that drop-out rates climb still further.
