Wednesday 29 July 2015

Have you had a good semester?

Hello again ladies and gentlemen. Today we will talk about this semester and how it has been.

This semester has been a very good one. It is the second semester, after 6 years of research and spending every day alone in an office, I decided to return to teaching.

Obviously at first this was a challenge, as it had been a while since I had taught full time. However, this is not always a bad thing and actually worked out very well. I have met many new people and discovered many new places.

However, if everything were perfectly this would be a romantic comedy, not reality. There hasn't actually been anything terrible, but probably the worst thing is changing from a job at a place with a reliable, regular salary, to a little more financial insecurity. Don't get me wrong, it is still not a problem to go to a nice restaurant when I want to, but payment is not always as regular as maybe would be preferred. Not the end of the world though.

Well, probably the biggest achievement so far has been finally finishing the design of my algorithms that I've been working on for quite a while. One less thing to do, but obviously when one thing is finished, there are always a hundred more appear!

Basically that is it so far, but there are a few more weeks to go, so lets see what happens before the end of the semester. Fingers crossed it is all good.




Wednesday 8 July 2015

Post 5 - A Photograph I like

This photograph was taken by one of my students of PENTA at La Catolica. It shows me with some of my best students in the class that I have known for around 4 years. It was taken on Saturday, two weeks ago. 
I like it mostly for sentimental reasons. I have been teaching on the course for almost 7 years and I have watched my students develop over these years from children to young adults. The students in the photograph have become my friends over this time and I have helped them many times with different personal questions and problems.
Also, this photograph is important to me as this was my last class ever on the course, as I decided to leave to focus on other work. It was a very emotional time for everyone and I will miss them all very much, but obviously I will stay in contact and help them in any way I can for the rest of their lives.