SICSA supervisor of the year silver award

I had a lovely surprise just after midday today when a delegation from the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance appeared at my office door. Led by one of my colleagues, they explained that they wanted to see me for a few minutes. I thought that this was a request for a meeting about some plans that my colleague and I had discussed on Wednesday.

I was wrong. They had come to deliver this certificate and make some very complimentary remarks about my work to support PhD students. Although I knew about the competition, and saw the news of the winner before Christmas, I had no idea that there was a second runner-up award. I had completely forgotten about the whole thing. This visit was very welcome on a dull day in January :-)

Afterwards I headed down the corridor to thank those who most likely nominated me. Although nominations are anonymous, my guess is that it was one or more of my seven current PhD students who put my name forward.

Thereafter it was back to paperwork for preparing grant applications, then reviewing a research bid for one of the UK research councils...

This evening, however, there was a bit more fun. Tom and Emily came over for curry and Catan. I played a quiet, stealth strategy and - despite making a terrible error very early in the game - I won. (For those who are interested, I accidentally laid a road that made it impossible to capitalise on the ore port. This was just at the point that I was generating tons of this resource. Duh!)

Exercise today: walking (14,206 steps)