School/Work Life
The university has been in session now for a month (give or take a few days). In that time, things have slowly gotten up to speed, and I think it’s safe to say that things are in full swing by now. There is never a dull moment, that’s for sure! I think the best adjective I’ve found to describe the existence of teaching is ‘relentless’. It just goes on and on and on!
Do I enjoy it? Certain parts for sure. I do like explaining things, but I’ve yet to find much joy in making homework solutions, or grading homework assignments. I have in fact almost given up on ‘grading’, because it takes so much time, so these days I practice the ‘quick skim’ too see if people did/attempted everything. How standards have fallen!
But the neat thing about working at a University are all the surrounding things, which I need to be better about utilizing. For example, I thoroughly enjoyed hearing Prof. Linda Darling-Hammond speak earlier this month on education reform and Kofi Annan is scheduled to speak next week. I’ve also made time to attend a “symposium” (aka ‘short lectures preceding a panel’) on gender-issues, as well as listening to a historic overview of what made the US universities so great.
Dr. Molly Carnes from UW-Madison giving a talk during a symposium titled „Do Women Face Bias in Academic Science Careers?“ on 7 September 2011 (Short answer: Yes.)
In my not-so-copious spare time, I also went to a ‘Welcome new Staff’ event, where we were told a little about the organizational structure of the university, and given a tour around the main campus building. There I discovered that inside that rather modest building is a fully functioning, and beautifully renovated chapel! (Insert grumble here regarding the theology department having such a fancy ‘lab’-space, when there are churches everywhere!)
There's a huge chapel in the main university building!! Here are the pretty chapel windows on 12 Sept 2011.
Pretty walls. It feels a little like one is in an airplane, about to hit the clouds. 🙂
Sadly, this little Monday-afternoon three-hours-off put the entire rest of the week out of whack, and I was playing catch-up for a long time afterwards as a result. 🙁
Since then, I haven’t been quite as brave in seeking out new things. Instead I’ve enjoyed my view, which got extra interesting on 15 September 2011. That day “they” finally lifted a wooden top floor that had been under construction for a couple of months onto its base. Luckily for the people involved, the house in need of a new top floor was right next to an empty lot (aka ‘the construction site’), so they didn’t have to move it very far.
The top floor that'd been under construction on an empty corner lot for a couple of months, finally got lifted on to its base next door on 15 September 2011. I thought the crane was most impressive!
After the exciting top-floor episode, the most exciting thing outside my window has been autumn colors and cloud formations. Which, in the scope of things, is pretty exciting stuff! 🙂
The view out my window around 5pm on 22 September 2011. Autumn colors are here! That parking-lot building down there is for sale, and every now and then people walk purposefully around it, but I don't think they have any takers yet.
Another highlight of this month was the annual 'Science Night' or 'Researcher's Night' on 23 September 2011. On behalf of the EE department a couple of students worked really hard to mostly finish a final project (not due for another 10 weeks!) early so we had something cool to show. One of them, Gunnar, is here on the left standing by his face-detecting-and-mechanically-tracking webcam. The student on the right, Olgeir, also brought some gear (an eerie electromagnetic radiation listening box) and stood watch for part of the night. Gunnar also brought a 'cat-deterrent', basically a water-squirter hooked up to a proximity sensor, and used it to guard the webcam. 🙂
We shared a booth with the civil engineering department (hence the fire-mannequins). My contribution was a little voice-altering program ("Raddbreytir") for kids that I had written the night before in Matlab. Strangely, it got spawned out of the previous week's homework assignment in Communications Theory! Basically, we'd ask kids if they wanted to chat with the computer. If they did, the computer (my recorded voice) would ask them what their name was, and record their reply (3 seconds!). Then the computer/my voice asked them to choose whether they'd like to be a chipmunk, a robot, or in an empty barrel. Once they'd tried one variation, they could choose a different voice, or stop and leave.
Ragnar giving the thumbs up in our booth, while Magnús helps a kid with the program. I must say that the little voice altering program was a big hit with the kids. Pretty much all of them smiled or laughed, and we were very busy for most of the night (it ran from 5-10pm). Yes, I will be the first to admit that the UI interface was clunky, and needed adult supervision, but I managed to incorporate recordings of me talking so it wasn't all just 'press this button'.
Once I got home from the Science Night (shortly after 9 pm, Magnús took the last shift) I showed Anna the program. I was bemused to realize that she thought the computer could actually understand what she was saying, so she got a short tutorial in programming and signal manipulations as a result. Oh, poor thing for having technical parents…!
Here are three voice samples and how they were made: Chipmunk, Robot and Empty Barrel.
So yes, that pretty much concludes what’s happened at work/school this September. I will say that I am much less desperate than I was last year, and that I’ve mostly been really good about going to bed before midnight. Is this my dream-job? I just don’t know… I think I suffer from a lack of role-models, in that I just haven’t really found a woman who’s life I’d like to emulate. I will also admit to having a hard time getting any kind of ‘research’ off the ground. How much that is a result of teaching two classes, and how much that is me being unconvinced of the fabulousness of doing research and getting published in the first place, is hard to tell. So yes, there may be a small existential crisis brewing. Oh, fun! 🙂
