March 2024 round-up

March had its fair share of highs and lows, as you can see below.

In particular, I was reminded that, even after all of these years, I still manage to grossly underestimate how long it takes me to develop a paper and to prepare a talk. Alas, at least there were no illnesses or major technical problems, this month.

Research

The submission of the misinformation grant application was definitely a “high”, this month – both because we did it, and because I learned a lot from the medical sciences and the data sciences colleagues, in the process. 

We also made some good progress on the experiments: got the ethics’ clearance for the pre-test; and cracked the hypotheses and the design of the experiment itself. After one meeting with our talented research assistant, I commented that if that meeting had been a gym workout session, we would surely have some serious delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS), the day after!

But, on the “low” front, we did not get the BA/Leverhulme grant. The applications were first reviewed for quality; and then, the ones that are deemed worthy of funding were entered into a lottery. While we passed the first stage, unfortunately we were not in the 24% of applications that received funding in the lottery stage. Yes, it’s great that we passed all quality threshold criteria and would have got the funding if there was enough money to go around. But it still stings that we missed out, in the lottery stage. 

Another “low” was being unable to join a super interesting Erasmus application because of, well, Brexit.

Writing

On the “high” column, I would highlight the submission of one journal paper about chatbots, good progress on revisions of a paper about decentralised social media (due mostly to my star co-author), and really interesting discussions about the conceptual framework for a paper on the metaverse. The acceptance of a paper for the Academy of Management conference, and another one for the workshop on Digital Data for Research in Organization Studies are also definite “highs”.

Though, these were counterbalanced by the rejection of a paper about generative AI. Another “low” was running out of time to finish and submit a paper about influencers to a special issue. Though, to be honest, this was mostly because I left it until too late to get started. There you go, after all of these years of developing and writing papers, I still manage to grossly miscalculate how long it takes me to do it.

Teaching

The main “high” this month, as far as teaching is concerned, was being nominated for a Sussex Education Award, in the “Teaching to Disrupt” category which, the website says, is “for teaching staff who dare to be different in their approach”. I was told that the nomination comments stated that I push students “to achieve greatness” and “try harder”. How cool is that? From the bottom of my heart, thank you to whoever nominated me!

Another “high” is that this semester’s module is entering its last stretch, and students seem to be “getting it”, which is not always easy in a Research Methods module.

On the “not so good” front, there was marking. 

Service

The big “high” this month was getting the role that I had interviewed for last month. I can now reveal that I had applied for the role of Deputy Director of the South-East Network for Social Sciences (SeNSS). SeNSS is an ESRC-funded, Doctoral Training Partnership of 10 leading UK universities, promoting inventive and inclusive social science research training and collaboration. My role is to provide leadership for studentship training, employability, and development, and to deputise for the Director as relevant. I start officially on April 1^st. 

Another big high was delivering a keynote talk at the Digital Marketing Colloquium 2024, which took place at the Bournemouth University Business School. My talk was about “Researching and shaping the future of AI-Powered Service Interactions”.

And I reviewed two papers.

On the “low” side, it took me two full days to prepare the keynote talk. Can you believe it? It really shouldn’t have taken me this long to prepare this talk. At the end of the day, it was about my work. But, in between the structure, the content, the illustrations and practicing to check the duration, I completely lost track of time.

On a personal front, there was IWD, Pi-Day, Easter and exam revisions. And, just like that, 25% of the year is already gone. I hope you are having a good one.