What do teaching fellows do over the summer?

Recently I have received email messages from my first year tutees which include phrases such as “I don’t know if you’re still around…”, “You might be on holiday…” and even a friend said “Lucky you, 3 months off”. As I have told them all, lovely as it would be to have 3 months off, that’s not the case, university academic staff members don’t have the same holidays as undergraduates. Whilst the summer provides a good opportunity for a focus on research and conference attendance for lecturers, what are teaching fellows (like me) doing?

My job mainly involves preparing and delivering lectures, practicals and tutorials, as well as all the associated marking. Teaching for me, at the University of Southampton, finished on Friday 17^th May. So you are probably wondering what I’ve been doing for the past month, with no teaching to do. Well, firstly there was the not so small matter of exam marking. Third year projects were also distributed for marking before teaching ended. So a lot of my time was taken up with marking, in order to meet the deadline we were given. There are then several meetings where marks are ratified, including one attended by examiners from other universities for finalists.

I am also heavily involved in developing a collaborative MRes programme in Wildlife Conservation, so have been to meetings at Marwell Wildlife’s zoological park as well as completing the mountains of required documents that are required.

My teaching fellow role involves an employability aspect, so I attend related meetings at a faculty and a university level. I am also the point of contact for local wildlife organisations, mainly as a result of a scheme which started before I started working here, summer internships for students at the end of their degree. The internships are paid, providing recent graduates with a CV and financial boost. I interview for the internships with partners from each involved organisation and also organise ecological training. You can read more about last year’s interships here: http://www.southampton.ac.uk/biosci/news/2012/07/09_hands_on_experience_of_ecological_work.page?

This summer I have 11 students collecting data for their third year projects. I am in email contact with all of them and have also met up with a few, even going to their field site for those collecting data in the UK. This is a nice opportunity to get outside the office! Last week I went to visit Somerset wildlife trust’s site at Westhay and met a student nearby on Southampton Common.

I have also undertaken some professional development, completing the University of Southampton’s Springboard programme and an HEA event on social media (hence my blog writing and increased tweeting @Judith_Lock).

In addition, we have started to think about preparing for modules starting in September, it’s not that far away! The MRes will start in September, which will require a lot of preparation. I’m also leading an Animal behaviour module, so have several lectures to write for it.

Finally, the thing which my recent time allocation study shows I spend 5% of my time on – research! As a teaching fellow my teaching has to come first (I have no problem with this) but there is time in the summer to work on papers which have been in development, complete, submit and  (hopefully) publish. I have been working on a paper on and off for a while but we have hit a wall with it, so I’m now awaiting some raw data, so that we can check the analysis.

I will also be taking some ‘me’ time and actually having some time off (just not 3 months!).