Induction

Well, that’s four solid days of Induction over and done with for another year. This is the process of welcoming new students onto the courses I run, filling them with rather boring but quite important information and beginning to get to know the new ones a bit. Today I had 2.5 hours of small group tutorials with half of the new first years (~30) and then group meetings with the returning Year 2 and 3 students.

It’s always interesting to meet and properly talk to the new students and find out a bit about them. This year we’ve got eerything from a professional boxer to a road-cyclist from the Sky team to an Olympic Development Squad wind-surfer to someone who is very keen on origami! (which gave me an excuse to tell my story about how, as a child, I put on an exhibition of my origami models in the local public library only for all of my models to be destroyed when the library burned down in a fire…).

This afternoon it was great to welcome back the returning students and I decided to test myself by trying to name every single one of them and only stumbled (okay, forgot) about 5 out of 60 or so in total which can’t be a bad achievement.

The trouble with Induction Week though is that it’s almost impossible to get any other work done for a few days so although I have the luxury tomorrow of a “clear” day in my diary, it’s going to be a day filled with pretty frantic activity to prepare for the start of teaching next week.