Friday was a watershed moment in my professional career as I stepped down from three roles - as Director of National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis (NIRSA, after 11.5 years), Director of National Centre for Geocomputation (NCG, after 2 years), and Chair of Irish Social Sciences Platform (ISSP, after 6 years). I'll continue to work in NIRSA as a PI on various projects, but will not be running the place on a day to day basis. I can't say I'll miss all the crappy admin and politics, though I'll not be able to escape it all. Eleven and a half years in one role is more than enough and the change should hopefully be good for me and the institute. Looking back it's been a productive decade and I'm happy that I've handed over NIRSA in better shape than I inherited it. Raising the salary every year for 15-25 people has been a challenge, but somehow we've scraped it together. Onwards to the next challenges ...
My posts this week
A coming storm?
Review of The Third Rail by Michael Harvey **.5
Review of The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt ****
Review of The Signal in the Noise by Nate Silver ****
3 comments:
Congratulations, Rob, on moving on to new horizons.
Wow, that is a lot of responsibility that you are letting go of. And the ability to be there but not be so "in charge" sounds good to me.
I don't fully lose responsibility - I'll still be looking after 4 large projects, but not the overall show plus a second institute. Looking back I still find it amazing that they gave me the job when I was 31; I can't imagine giving the post to someone so green (I was only a handful of years post PhD at the time). It was probably a sink or swim moment; thankfully I discovered I could doggy paddle and bluff at the same time.
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