Merry Christmas and Happy New Year
A very special year is coming to an end.
Dear staff
Another year has passed and it is now the last ”Word from the dean” of 2021. Christmas is just around the corner and once again it is in the shadow of Corona. Although the university is open and we can conduct research and teaching as long as we have a Corona pass, we have chosen to put some exams online for the first week of January. We do this not least to ensure that there are available rooms for the exams which must be held on campus and which require extra space to comply with the distance requirements. I cross my fingers that the new initiatives work with the rapid roll-out of the 3rd vaccine shot to prevent the Omicron variant from gaining an upper hand. It is very difficult at the moment to assess what the next few months will look like. We have been here before and can quickly switch to online teaching and homework, but it has costs in the form of extra work and degraded quality in, for example, teaching. In other words: a situation that we would like to avoid.
Corona has marked a large part of 2021, but after the summer there has been very high activity in both research and teaching. Many new employees from both Denmark and abroad have been hired on (saved) funds from research projects, and this has created a lot of activity all around. During the autumn our researchers received many impressive grants and teaching has gone very well. We have worked on our strategy and implemented a Workplace Assessment and Well-Being Survey, for which we have received much praise, as there is progress in many areas.
Conversely, the roll-out of new administrative IT systems has been tasking and required extra patience, but we hope that it will be worth it in the end. The work with ”Regionalisation of education programmes” and the institutional plan has been frustrating, not least as employers are looking for more and not fewer graduates from the natural sciences.
This is just a small selection of the many things that have happened during the year and which reflect everyday life at a university.
This is a dynamic workplace where the days rarely resemble each other. It is demandin and I would like to take this opportunity to thank all employees for the great effort that you all put into the Faculty of Science and the university on a daily basis. It is only thanks to your efforts that we have succeeded as much as we have seen in 2021. It is a great pleasure to work with all of you – both online and when we meet in person. I hope you get to enjoy Christmas time without it being affected too much by Corona.
I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Marianne Holmer, dean