An academic's life: If it was not for Linkedin…..

I would have not known that I have been at UWA for 12 years so that’s a new record for my 22 years working life. Thanks to all who took time to congratulate. Much appreciated.

Looking back at the four organisations I have worked for, as a full time medical educator, perhaps joining UWA has not been a bad decision at all. The benefit of working so long at one place is building networks within the institution but at the same for a stranger at a completely new place, one of the sources of error is the time taken to assimilate, understand and move on before I actually start feeling comfortable in the new surrounding and am not sure if these circumstances are taken into consideration.

For a person, who already takes six months to adjust in a new place it took me perhaps three years to

a. understand how things work at the Uni and faculty level.

b. slowly detach from previous association with Higher Education Commission.

c. complete the pending projects

The most struggling aspect of work was perhaps the open space, which I still have not got used to and in my initial year, I actually used to work at home rather than office. There is now research out there, which says that open space offices are not for everyone and specially academics who need a quiet time off and on as well as need to see students.

The twelve years also saw a number of friends leaving university including Millicent Taylor, Diana Jonas Dwyer, Michael O’ Halloran and more recently Lena Lejmonoski. I had the privilege of working with all of them on research projects and miss all of you. Also need to mention Coral, who was our OSCE Guru and sadly passed away during Christmas time a few years back and is still sadly missed.

These friendships have been cultivated because of the long time that I have stayed here and cannot compensate for the new networks that are built through my involvement with National ePortfolio Group, Assessment benchmarking projects, ANZAHPE and Athena SWAN Group yet, life goes on. One other positive outcome is that if I have to visit a hospital, it is a UWA students taking care of my friends

and what a relief it is to see them working with a smile.

Last week got a paper rejected, reviewed three papers and have started working on an ARC grant with finalising admission details for a new PhD student. So let’s pack the bags to go to the conference in Abu Dhabi.