Walking home through Maynooth this evening, the streets filled with partying students, I was reminded of this:
It’s the central part of the triptych Das letzte Gericht (The Last Judgment) by Hieronymus Bosch. The medium is oil on oak panel and it measures 164 x 127 cm. The original work is in the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.
The figures at the top, looking down on the chaos, are clearly identifiable as members of academic staff, while those below are students. I’m sure that if Christmas jumpers had been invented in 1486, when the work is thought to have been completed, Bosch would have painted a few in…
I saw Maynooth University Library Cat on the way to my office this morning. Most students I saw were heading in the opposite direction, in their Christmas jumpers, to pubs, or at least to queue outside them as they weren’t yet open. I think it will be a quiet day on campus, if not in town. Such is the Maynooth Student Xmas I blogged about yesterday.
Anyway, as you can see, Séamus was looking a bit disgruntled, though as usual he was receptive to a stroke or two and a head scratch. It had been raining overnight and such food as was in his dish had turned to mush and was in need of replacement. At least his water bowl was full.
The week ahead is the last week of the teaching term at Maynooth and, since I don’t have any sessions scheduled for Friday 19th December, I will finish on Thursday 18th and take the Friday off. I don’t think there’ll be many people – either staff or students – around on Friday anyway.
Tomorrow (Monday) is the infamous “Student Xmas” in Maynooth where many undergraduates spend the day getting drunk rather than attending lectures or tutorials. Many start drinking in the morning and carry on until the pubs close in the early hours. I wouldn’t mind this excess too much, but the town is usually in a terrible mess on Tuesday morning, with fast food containers, broken bottles and vomit littering the streets. I have a lecture at 2pm on Monday (tomorrow) which will go ahead and a telecon at 4pm. After those I’ll be making my way home and keeping well out of it until I have to navigate a passage through the debris on Tuesday morning.
Two pubs, Brady’s amd The Roost promote this pre-Chrtistmas celebration vigorously on social media. I imagine their takings are substantial. I wonder if they – or indeed the Student’s Union – pay a little to help clear up the aftermath?
On Tuesday I have three lectures, but one of them (at 11am) will be the final class test for Differential Equations and Complex Analysis so there’s little for me to do but sit there, invigilating. I have promised to get the answers corrected and returned before the break so I’ll have to do them by Thursday, the date of the last tutorial. Our Department Christmas Celebration is on the afternoon of Wednesday 17th, so I’ll have to fit the grading in on Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning.
The other two lectures on Tuesday are Engineering Mathematics, followed by another on Wednesday. I was going to use one of the Tuesday slots for the final class test for this module, but a number of students asked me to postpone it because they anticipate being hung over. I don’t mind but the only available time with a suitable room is Thursday, so they won’t get their marks until after the holiday, for which I feel no need to apologise. It’s good to have the three lecture slots because I missed an hour last week because of the power cut owing to Storm Bram.
The weather is rather strange today, as a result of Storm Bram which is approaching from the South. The storm is bringing warm air with it, so the temperature is around 15°C which is very mild for December. The prevailing winds are usually westerly or south-westerly.
Heavy rain fell overnight, especially in the South. It’s clearer now and the winds are starting to pick up. Although Maynooth is relatively sheltered we’re still expecting gusts up to 100 km/h. As a precaution, the large tent which is usually situated outside the John Hume building has been dismantled to stop it blowing away.
Campus remains open and lectures are going ahead as normal.
At least mine are…
UPDATE: 4.25pm. I spoke to soon. I have a teaching session between 2pm and 4pm on Tuesdays; I usually take a break halfway through, as I did this afternoon. Chatting with some students in the interval we noted the wind was picking up and discussed the possibility of a power cut. We obviously tempted fate, as no sooner had we resumed for the second half when all the power went off. It came on intermittently a few times, but at 3.30pm I called off the lecture. It was too dark to see the blackboard and no other AV equipment was working. When I got back to the Physics Department, where the power was also off, as it appeared to be for the whole campus, a colleague who lives nearby told me that our area of Maynooth still had power. So I headed home, via Dunnes (which has a generator) to buy a few things. As I walked through Maynooth some lights were on, some were off. The worst affected area seemed to be to the north-west and around campus. Anyway, I’m home safely and can continue working here as long as the power stays on.
P.S. The storm is named after Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, who was born in Dublin.
I’ve been a bit preoccupied these recent weeks so it was with a shock that I realised that we’re into Week 9, which means just four weeks (including this one) until the end of term and just a month before Christmas. Teaching finishes here in Maynooth on Friday 19th December, but I don’t have any lectures on Fridays so in my case it will finish the day before (with a tutorial). I don’t know how many students will be there, but the module concerned is my 4th year Mathematical Physics module and the students are very hard-working, so I think most will attend. After such a busy term I’m sure that they will need a break as much as I will.
I had to rejig the schedule for both modules I am teaching this semester to accommodate the introduction of in-class tests to replace take-home assignments (for reasons I outlined here). I’ve also been handing out voluntary exercises for practice, not counting towards the module mark but for formative reasons. Both modules are mathematical in nature, and I think the best way to learn mathematics is by doing it…
Despite the changes with respect to last year, I am still roughly on track. In my Engineering Mathematics module I’ve just finished Laplace transforms, and will start Fourier methods tomorrow. With the mathematical physicists, I am in the middle of complex analysis, having done complex differentiation and conformal mappings and starting complex integration next week.
I still have a couple more class tests to get through. On the positive side, the students are turning up for them and have expressed approval for the fact that they don’t have compulsory homework to do off-campus. This form of assessment is undoubtedly harder work for the students, it’s also better preparation for the examination that take-home assignments.
We’ve just received the draft examination timetable for January, and I’m pleased that both of the examinations for which I am responsible will take place quite early in the examination period (on 12th and 15th January, respectively) so I should be able to get them corrected in time to have a break for some research before teaching resumes at the start of February.
I’ve been playing host today to my former PhD student, now at the University of Vienna, Mateja Gosenca, who gave a talk on “Ultralight Dark Matter: Phenomenology and Observational Constraints”. Mateja did an MSc at the University of Sussex before doing a PhD under my supervision, so it is very nice to have her visit us in Maynooth.
It was only when I started to think about how to introduce her Colloquium that I remembered that Mateja was co-author of the very first paper published by the Open Journal of Astrophysics, way back in 2016. At that time we were running an experimental prototype site before switching to the Scholastica platform we now use, but it was still a landmark. We’ve now published 415 papers.
A couple of years ago I posted an item about the news of a proposed merger of Maynooth University and Dundalk Institute of Technology. That piece began with the following:
Life is full of surprises, especially if you’re a member of academic staff at Maynooth University.
Today it was revealed that the institution that employs me is planning to merge with Dundalk Institute of Technology. It was revealed not in a direct message to staff, but through an article in the national media, in this case the Sunday Independent. The article there is paywalled but there is another piece here.
This is astonishing news, not least because of the way it has come out. Yet again, the only way that staff at Maynooth can find out what’s going on is through the newspapers. Senior Management don’t deign to inform us of anything…
Not surprisingly I hadn’t heard anything about how the proposed merger was progressing except for a couple of items in the national media. For example, in May this year, there was an announcement of the formation of a Regional Graduate Academy linking postgraduate education in Dundalk and Maynooth.
Today, however, I saw another news item announcing that Dundalk IT has now decided to become a College of Queen’s University Belfast. It explains:
The new partnership between Queens University Belfast and Dundalk Institute of Technology is not a “parent child relationship,” and represents the first “all-Ireland university”, the Minister for Further and Higher Education has said.
DkIT is set to become a University College following the agreement with QUB, which will see it change from an IT to a University College of Queen’s University Belfast.
What does this new new relationship between DkIT and QUB mean for the old new relationship between DkIT and Maynooth University? Have they called the Maynooth-Dundalk merger off? Or will the three institutions form a ménage à trois?
Don’t ask me. I only work here. Perhaps I’ll be able to find out by reading the newspapers.
P.S. Coincidentally, the next “President’s Update” for staff at Maynooth, scheduled for December, has been postponed until the New Year.
P.P.S. It is about 80km from Belfast to Dundalk and about 100km from Dundalk to Maynooth.
Just a quick post to point out that today is LGBTQIA+ STEM Day, which aims to celebrate to celebrate the work of LGBTQIA+ people in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), but also to highlight the barriers still facing us.
This also provides an opportunity for me to send my best wishes to all LGBTQIA+ staff and students at Maynooth and around the world! As far as I know, my Employer is not marking this occasion. This surprises me as it is not unknown for them to engage in pinkwashing from time to time, whenever it suits them for some reason.
P.S. I’m reminded that it was 22 years ago today that Section 28 was finally repealed in England and Wales. With reactionary fforces around the world attacking our hard-won rights, it is important that we cling on to what we’ve got.
from left to right: Dr Neil Trappe (HoD, Physics); Dr John Regan; Dr Aoibhinn Gallagher; Dr Matthew Birney; Dr Hannah O’Brennan; me; Dr Jonivar Skullerud
Yesterday I attended a conferring ceremony at Maynooth which was a very special occasion because it involved the formal award of the PhD degree to Aoibhinn Gallagher whom I supervised. Two other research students from the Department of Physics got their PhDs yesterday too; Matthew Birney and Hannah O’Brennan. Matthew (ESO Garching) and Aoibhinn (Bielefeld) both now have postdoctoral positions in Germany, incidentally.
These events are not actually called Graduation Ceremonies here in Ireland but Conferring Ceremonies. I was impressed that the local suppliers of academic dress, Phelan Conan were able to supply the correct 1989 vintage DPhil gown from Sussex University as opposed to the less interesting modern one. I would have worn it for the picture above, but by the time we found Hannah to take the photo I had already returned it to the supplier. Here are two more with myself in the gown and mortarboard:
left to right: Dr Emma Whelan; Dr Matthew Birney; Dr Aoibhinn Gallagher; meMyself and Aoibhinn
You can see a picture of me wearing the same sort of gown in Brighton back in 1989, when I was a skinny young queen, here. I’ll add more pictures from yesterday if and when I get them.
As well as the PhDs we also saw the entire class of our MSc in Theoretical Physics and Mathematics get their degrees. I haven’t got any photographs of them, but will add any that I find. Here is a photograph of them outside the TSI building, courtesy of Jonivar Skullerud.
After the ceremony, those who got their degrees went for dinner with their respective parents, siblings and others who had come to attend the ceremony. We did meet up later on, however, in a local pub for a drink or several. In among all that I didn’t have time to write a post, bringing to an end a blogging streak of 109 days.
Graduation ceremonies are funny things. With all their costumes and weird traditions, they even seem a bit absurd. On the other hand, even in these modern times, we live with all kinds of rituals and I don’t see why we shouldn’t celebrate academic achievement in this way.
I like graduation ceremonies, actually. As each person walks across to be presented with their scroll you realize that every one of them has a unique story to tell and a whole universe of possibilities in front of them. How their lives will unfold no-one can tell, but it’s a privilege to be there for one important milestone on their journey, even those from other departments with whom you have had no contact at all.
I always find these ceremonies bittersweet occasions, though. There’s joy and celebration, of course, but these are tempered by the realization that many of the young people whom you’ve seen around long enough to grow accustomed to their faces, will disappear into the big wide world, in some cases never to be seen again. Although everyone is rightly proud of the achievement – either their own in the case of the graduands or that of others in the case of the guests – there’s also a bit of sadness to go with the goodbyes. It always seems that as a lecturer you are only just getting to know students by the time they graduate, but that’s enough to miss them when they go.
Anyway, all this is a roundabout way of saying congratulations once more to everyone who graduated yesterday, including Matthew, Hannah and Aoibhinn, and I wish you all the very best for the future!
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In the Dark 