Too hot

This month is extremely busy and I seriously need a week of days made by 34 hours each in order to avoid any delay. Apart from the usual teaching which is finally coming close to the end of this period (hopefully by the end of the month) but which kept me busy at least 3 days per week, there have been lots of meetings and work to do. Add the fact that in the last few weeks people here were going crazy for a very hot weather (I think they are not used to such “high” and constant temperatures of 30 degrees celcius), then you can understand how much willingness I must possess in order to keep up with everything. Not that I am complaining about having lots of work to do, rather it is something which I have always found to be exciting, but having everything squeezed into a couple of weeks is not exactly very healthy.

A very quick recap of the most important things I have done include the followings. First, lots of consultation for medical students who are now close to the dealdine for the submissions of their theses and internship reports. I think I got at least 2/3 requests per week which is quite a lot and given that students are afraid of learning anything that has to do with a statistical analysis, patience will be an essential virtue that I must show off in order to survive the upcoming days. Wish me all good luck ! Second, alongside with teaching statistics in a course I get lots of emails from the students on different parts of the course. This is not something that really bothers me expect when their questions are all about what type of questions there will be in the exam rather than “I would like to understand better this concept” which can be a bit frustrating from time to time. Again part of the job, so I can complain as much as I want but it is something I really need to do. Third, I have given my first invited talk at my department of methodology and statistics and it has been a very interesting and nice experience. I think I overdid it since I wanted to give a nice overview of what my research is about but I ended up putting too many slides for a 1 hour presentation. This hurted a bit the pace of my talk since I had to speed up in certain points and I felt that many people were lost, especially towards the end. It was very nice to introduce my work to my collegaues and receive their feedback on some parts of the work as well as suggesitons to explore in the future. I hope next time I will be able to adjust the presentation based on the actual time given to me so to make sure people will not feel disoriented/bored (at least not too much). Finally, next week I will also give another invited talk about my missingHE package at the R-HTA summer workshop. This annual conference is specifically directed towards people who would like to use R in health economic analyses and I hope I can capture the attention of someone who might decide to try out my package on their own analyses. I still have to finish the presentation but since this time I only have 15 minutes I need to make sure to not talk for more than 1 hour!

I am also trying to work on my research but the available time is very little so I have made basically no progress. Next month I will have some break from my teaching duties so I hope I will be able to focus on my work. However, another big enemy is approaching who may threaten my ability to complete this task: sunny waether. Now more than ever I would be happy to have a fresh July which would make my life much easier. Let’s see what it will be.

Oh by the way, did I perhaps mention that my new article has been published already? check it out!