Sunday, September 1, 2013

Lazy Sunday Service

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:

seana graham said...

Congratulations, Rob, on moving on to new horizons.

TracyK said...

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.

Rob Kitchin said...

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.