First of all I had an absolutley marvelous time at the Student Success Conference! It was my first one and it felt like home. I knew more people than I expected to but I think that is because now NAEEA has partnered with this conference. So many enabling program people there! It was SO encouraging!

Home

I did two presentations and a poster. The poster was the Meme project and we got a LOT of interest. I had my speel perfected after the first morning tea. I essentially explained that we were not trying to learn how we could use memes to help students – we are looking at it the opposite way – What can we learn about the student experience from the memes that they engage with? Our poster had all the important stuff – plus a heap of memes that students have sent us. It was a hit 🙂

The first presentation was on the Wellbeing SIG edited book and although I only had about 12 people it got good questions and feedback. The book is on Trauma aware teaching, so a popular topic I think.

The final presentation was with Trixie James and Gemma Mann so instantly it was going to be fun! We presented findings from the autoethnography we did about student support. We wanted to explore the definition of student support – we believe there is not a consistent definition and that has negative impacts on staff and students. For example, the line between the lecturer counselling the student or referring them to the couselling services can be blurred and ultimatley it becomes a lot of emotional labour and can lead to burnout.

We had 30 or maybe more in that session including Cathy Stone. A great little discussion got going at the end. Lots of questions asked and people came up to us later and complimented us on the project. As the project was originally my idea it made me feel pretty jolly awesome.

Overall Student Success Conference 2025 – totally marvelous, very enjoyable, learnt a lot, fun fun fun and a total success.

Th other achievement(s) lately is the NAEEA Seed grants. So these are small ($2500) grants offered to the Special Interest Groups (SIGs) and I lead one for the Self- Efficacy SIG that I facilitate and I was also listed on the Wellbeing SIG. We got both!!!!!! Woot Woot!!!

So the Wellbeing SIG is the edited book and I am going to be a section editor, plus I have also submitted a chapter proposal. Ang Jones is leading it – can’t wait!

The Self-Efficacy grant project is to create a Toolkit for improving Self-efficacy – so it’s very complimentary to my PhD. Trixie, Ang and Amy Robinson is on that team so it’s going to be a world of fun but I’m also confident that we’ll get it done.

I have also been offered full time work. I have recently gone from 0.5 to 0.7 so that was a blessing but full time would be excellent. I’m just not sure I could handle it to be honest – not while I’m still trying to get my PhD done. I have made some progress in that area… but not a lot.

So all wonderful news there I guess. In other news, I am taking another break from my PhD. I just have too much going on at the moment in my personal life and I feel like a camel with an awful lot of straws on my back! It’s going to be medical leave, with a letter from my psychologist. So that ties back to the offer of full time work. I still have some time to think about it.

As it stands I work about 30 hours a week and get paid for 25 so I really SHOULD accept at least some fraction incease – at LEAST up to 0.8. I’ll let you know!