First Professional Role and A Good Week

I have good news to share. After three job interviews over the last two months since returning from Australia, I have now accepted my first professional role as LRC manager at an FE college in Cambridgeshire! I will be starting in early August. I'm not sure how this will impact my Chartership as my proposed hand in date is now looking a bit ambitious, especially as I'll have a bit of a commute until we are able to move house.
The college I'm moving to is going through a major library refurb this summer, in order to put in a lot more computers. From September there will be classes in the library at all times which will be supervised and motivated by LRC staff. This will be great in terms of promoting Information Skills by stealth! The pay off is that they've decided to put all of their books into rolling stacks to make space for these computers. I'm a little concerned that this may marginalise the use of the books, so I'm going to have to work hard and get creative to promote them. They have a very well developed VLE and e-book collection which is part of the reason they are doing this.
I'm really going to miss my current workplace. I really like the students and couldn't be happier with my manager. She's been a real mentor to me and I'll definitely be keeping in touch. But unfortunately the downside of working in a small school is that there are less opportunities for progression which is why I'm moving on.

The job interviews I had were really fun actually. I've delivered classes, done presentations and roleplays, and been interviewed by a student council who wanted to know what piece of cutlery I'd be and who I would be in Stars in their Eyes! (A spoon and Edith Piaf, for those curious).
All of the interviews were whole day events, where you spend a lot of time with the other candidates. This was interesting. At best I was meeting other professionals (I ended swapped email addresses with someone I was meant to be competing with!), at worst I saw the lousy side of human nature (another candidate trying to psyche me out with 'gosh aren't you young to be here?' comments).

This week I delivered two Information Skills lessons to AS English Literature classes as part of their progression to A2. It was for the module War and the Individual which was ideal as I read a lot of history and war fiction. It went really well and I'm pretty pleased with myself as my new job will involve a lot more working with classes than my current role. However, it made me realise how much I'm really going to miss some of the teachers and the strong links I've made with departments.

Today is BTEC hand in day, and I've spent quite a bit of time one-on-one with students helping them finish their work. The amount of cut and pasting is worrying. I wish there was more uptake from the departments for Information Skills sessions during the year. I feel like what I'm doing today is just making sure that they don't get done for plagiarism rather than giving them skills.

In other good news, my colleague that I've been tutoring who is doing the same MSc that I did has passed her second semester. I'm really happy for her as I know she was worried, and I hope that my efforts have helped. I'm quite jealous of her at the moment because her dissertation is really interesting.