New Year Stuff

This is the season for resolutions and crystal-ball gazing.  I do have a New Year's resolution - it is to get fit enough to ride the Maratona dles Dolomites in July - roughly the equivalent of riding up and down Froggatt Edge  20 times!


And the crystal ball?  I think the key issues for the Faculty this coming year will be:

1. The Research Excellence Framework (REF). Each year the Faculty receives a little over £10M from the government as part of our core grant, reflecting the quality and volume of our research.  We spend that money on general running and staff costs.  The assessment of quality happens every few years through what was known as the RAE, and will be known as REF.  This is the year where we start to crank up our preparations at faculty level - commencing with the appointment of a Faculty REF coordinator.  We have taken a deliberately low-key approach until now, confident that departments have things in hand and that the best preparation for the REF was to give people time to do world-class research. In that respect, if I were to make one observation of how best to prepare for the REF it would be: finish writing that killer paper before second semester starts.
2. 2012 is here!  2012 in this context being not just a date but the year in which home undergraduate fees rise to £9K.  This means two things: our admissions teams will have even more work to do than usual managing student recruitment and when the students arrive we must give them the experience we promise.  In that regard, Richard Tozer recently wrote a very interesting paper for Faculty Learning and Teaching Committee about student satisfaction.  The upshot was: the great majority of our students are thoroughly satisfied because the great majority of our staff make the effort to do the things we say we do.  So my one message would be: keep doing the things we say we do.
3. Buildings.  A lot of people in the Faculty will spend a lot of time this year planning the delivery of the new Engineering Graduate School (on the corner of Broad Lane and Newcastle Street), the design of the New Engineering Building on the Jessop's East Site and the refurbishment of the entire Mappin quad.  This is surely a once in a generation opportunity to change the environment in which we work - get involved!

Happy New Year