Having an online UniSIG meeting was a new venture, but on 17 July, 17 punters logged in for an hour-long afternoon session to catch up with each other and discuss the Covid crisis and how it has been impacting our work and lives. Members who’d been following reports in the Dutch and international press mentioned some of the trends in universities’ teaching and student admissions. At least one person had noticed a decline in assignments relating to research grant applications, but it seems that this might simply be because deadlines have been moved back and so grants are still being written.
A few of the teachers of academic and scientific writing had plenty to say about how they’ve had to move their teaching online, so that at times the meeting seemed to be more SENSE Ed than UniSIG. Nevertheless, this only underlines the overlap in interest between the two SIGs – which could be exploited in the future by holding joint SENSE Ed/UniSIG meetings.
As five of the attendees were newbies who’d joined SENSE in 2020, we spent time finding out where they are based and what they do. One of them, Danielle Carter, promoted the new Starters SIG, which she’s helped set up. Mike Gould pointed out that SENSE’s mentoring programme is a good resource for starters in the language profession. It can also be useful for established language professionals who want to acquire a new skill: one of our longstanding UniSIG members is hoping to be mentored so that she can branch out into copywriting.
Our discussion about the format and content of future online meetings yielded various points:
- The ‘as you like it’ style of meeting that kicked off the past two academic years is a nice idea, but if we continue to use a one-hour Zoom format and topics are known beforehand, there should be time limits on the contributors and time should be reserved for spontaneous topics.
- Webinars are not a popular way of holding a meeting.
- We should try breakout groups split along ‘hard’ versus ‘soft’ sciences.
- We should think about what is meant by ‘science’: Ed Hull has promised to talk briefly on this at a future meeting, to kick off a discussion.
- Occasional ‘social’ online meetings would be fun. Late August would be a good time to have one.
I’ll act on these ideas: watch out for UniSIG announcements! And if you have any tips about colleagues or acquaintances who – like Ed – would be prepared to give a short talk (15 minutes) on a topic relating to working for or in academia, please
