I was shadowed today by Harriet, a Stage 4 MEng Mech Eng student. We deliberately chose one of Harriet’s lighter teaching days, but there were still a few classes that she was scheduled to attend, and I naturally didn’t want to interfere with them. There were a couple of meetings that I couldn’t get Harriet in to, one of which clashed with one of her lectures. I can understand the nervousness of others about allowing student shadows to attend meetings, but it was a pity, nonetheless. We have agreed that Harriet will shadow me for another half day to make up for this, and I am trying to get her into some other meetings in a couple of weeks’ time.

At the moment I am going through the ‘mods and regs’ process, so Harriet’s introduction to the work that I do was to proof read some MOFs. Gillian Whittaker and/or Lynne Dixon, the Faculty Office Quality Team, have already ironed out most of the problems by the time MOFs reach me, and I end up largely picking up typos. Harriet showed that she was more than a match for me, identifying missing full stops, inconsistent capitalisation, etc. She’ll probably find oodles of errors in this post! I hope that, unlike me, she is able to read a restaurant menu without correcting all the spelling mistakes.

Harriet was introduced to the rest of the staff on the first floor of the Faculty Office, in particular the two Scotts dealing with data entry of attendance monitoring, and (some of) the recruitment team. I went through some of the other matters I have to deal with from time to time. In particular I explained the External Examiner system, and the fact that I’m an EE elsewhere. It so happened that an email came in related to issues raised by an EE. We talked about the CASAP and my role as an FPLO. And here it so happened that an email came in from a CASAP participant requesting feedback on their Module Review (Part B of CASAP Module 1). Harriet questioned the significance of the 25-hour clock on my desk. I explained that this was given to me by some colleagues from Odessa who are participants in a TEMPUS SAFEGUARD project that I’m the coordinator for. While I was out at a meeting Lynne went through the previous FLTSEC, which Harriet had attended, indicating the follow-up actions that had to be taken.

Harriet attended a meeting with Bryn Jones (PG Dean), Jo Geary (Deputy Head of Admin), and Dave Ramsey (Faculty Accountant) where we discussed tuition fees being paid direct to Schools, and student planning numbers for the Faculty Office. Hearing about the Shadowing project Bryn immediately offered to participate.

I hope Harriet got something out of this. It probably all seemed very bitty, but that’s often the nature of the way I work. There were occasional interruptions with phone calls that needed an instant response, and whilst I tried to ignore my email, nevertheless I got drawn in to ensure that I missed nothing urgent. Maybe next time I should switch my machine off. There were a number of ‘time outs’ where it was necessary to give some background to the topic being discussed, and the people involved.

I’ll be shadowing Harriet a week on Friday. I hope her lecturers don’t feel intimidated, Harriet is going to forewarn them.