I am coming to the end of a very lovely first week here at Birmingham City University, where I have just taken up a lectureship in the Faculty of Health, Education and Life Sciences.
My position is a Lecturer in Academic Skills Support and I am based in the Personal Development Department. We are a small team (all of whom are incredibly lovely) who offer support to students in all the schools within the faculty, providing assistance with any aspect of their work relating to academic skills, whether that be in critical analysis, essay writing, referencing, presentation preparation, numeracy and so on. Essentially, we help students to do well at university by improving their ability to communicate, present and fully develop the understanding and ideas they already have. This is mostly done through one-to-one tutorials but we also deliver larger workshops and lectures around academic skills, and I even have my own module to deliver from September – January titled ‘Essential Academic Skills for Degree Level Study’.
I have really enjoyed teaching this sort of materials in tutorials I’ve ran at Royal Holloway for the last two years, so I am really excited to get stuck into this role. And whilst there is no Geography involved in this job (sadly), I am supporting a really interesting set of courses. Within the Faculty we have four school:
- School of Nursing and Midwifery
- School of Health Sciences (which includes a range of new sport and exercise courses beginning in September)
- School of Education and Social Care
- Defence School of Healthcare Education
I am however, by no means done with Geography or Jographies (just in case you were concerned). I will be completing my PhD alongside this job, which BCU are being very supportive of. I have a little over a year before my final deadline, within which plenty of writing needs to be done. After which, lots more writing to publish the PhD in the forms of academic papers, books and more public material will take place. There is still much to be written about jographies!
Jographies 
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