lupestripe's lair

It's been a couple weeks since getting back from NFC and not a ton has happened, although life remains busy. This has come in a few different forms (the usual management of Master's and PhD students, hosting a visiting speaker, sitting on a one-day review panel for one of the UK's major fellowships), but the big task has been PhD admissions. For the fourth consecutive year I am on the department's admissions committee and therefore have to, first, read loads of applications to define our shortlist and then, second, sit through loads of interviews to determine our ranked list of offers. This is obviously a pretty important job as the careers of younger people are at stake, and this year I've had the time to take it quite seriously - since there were no other really major deadlines I had time to read every written application fully and score it carefully. There was also a surge in the number of "Home" (UK/Ireland) applications this year, and as it was difficult to establish a clear cutoff for who to interview (or not), we also ended up interviewing more students than normal despite having fewer places to offer and so the interviews themselves took most of three full days. That's all done now though, and next week I'll have my time back for research. (Or whatever else distracts me instead of research.)

Outside work, I've been somewhat listless recently. I've heard nothing back about the ambitious job I'd applied for at the start of February, and it's probably fair to conclude I didn't pass the first stage and won't have an interview (which is the result I expected). So I have to grapple again with my path forward here: do I really have a means of making Liverpool a permanent home after all (despite the various career risks I mentioned in recent entries) and if not what is a viable exit route. A usual, this thinking has not led to any real answers, and I do at least have the luxury of waiting a year: as much as I worry about things in the long term, the short-term situation remains mostly fine. Still, given the age I am at these days I'm uneasy about the lack of any real clear long-term plan or realistic goal in my professional or personal life. Technological developments (AI) and politics (war) are only deepening these worries.

Some other depressing news also landed this week. Back in 2023 I posted about a collaborator who passed away unexpectedly, which hit close to home because he was about my age and worked on basically the same topic as me for his PhD thesis (and for a long time after). Well, I guess once was not enough because somehow this exact thing happened again: last week a different collaborator of mine, who also worked on the same topic for her PhD thesis (and after), and is also about my age, died after a several-year struggle with cancer. I had some warning about this (she e-mailed me personally about a month ago saying her treatment had not gone well and likely she had only a few weeks left) but that didn't make things any easier. She was an extraordinarily nice person and even though I wasn't close personal friends with her in the way I was with my other colleague, it's unbelievably tragic that something like this has happened.

But to try to keep myself from getting too dour about all of the above, I have been trying to get my travel plans for the rest of the year into shape as it already looks like this is going to be one of the busiest years for me on that front yet. Spring won't be too busy (although I have a trip to California lined up at the end of the month) but the summer is probabaly going to be the craziest one yet, with international trips virtually every week between mid-May annd mid-August - half of which are work, and half vacation. I'll probably be completely exhausted by the end of it (and my chances of getting any work done are approximately nil, other than the service committments to the field that motivate half of the travel). But it will at least take my mind off some of the broader worriess.