Happy Valentine’s day!

The rose is red, the violet’s blue,
The honey’s sweet, and so are you. […]

I originally wrote this post to announce me starting my new job. I didn’t post it then, because it was quite a big transition and in the end I wasn’t prepared to deal with it in public. I didn’t really have any time at all to adjust – I sat in my office in Norway until late one Friday night, grading the exams my students had just written, and then the next Monday I started at another job in another country, just like that.

Now I have already been in this job for 2.5 months, and I am really happy. I am in the job that I have been describing to people even though I didn’t know it existed until 8 months ago when I found it advertised, applied, got the offer, accepted the offer and all this time couldn’t believe my luck. And it is not in oceanography.

It is not all completely new, and it is in fact closely related to the things that I enjoyed most at my old job and that I spent plenty of my evenings and weekends on: Thinking about how to improve teaching, developing materials to support student learning, and evaluating if that goal has been met. And if it hasn’t been met – back to square one and start from scratch!

I am not doing this in the context of oceanography, instead I am responsible for mechanical engineering, ship building and related subjects. But I don’t feel like that is taking me too far away from oceanography – after all, I studied ship building and marine technology as a minor subject when doing my Master’s in oceanography. And the physical basis is the same anyway. So if anything, it is complementary to oceanography.

Nevertheless, it is all new and rather than a “postdoctoral fellow in physical oceanography”, I am now a “coordinator of teaching innovation” (doesn’t sound too bad either, does it?). But being an oceanographer, going on awesome cruises every year, showing experiments to my nerdy friends and their nerdy friends at every opportunity has for the last 12 years been such a big part of who I am, so even though this new job is my dream job, I am sad to be closing this awesome chapter of my life.

But even though in the future I might not have the opportunity to go on cruises as regularly as I would like (but pssst – there is something in the planning there!), and even though some posts on this blog might change topic ever so slightly (from playing with water towards playing with water and ships, but I’ll also spend 10 days in August just doing the kind of tank experiments you know and love from my blog, and you bet I’ll be blogging about that!), I can’t imagine any of the rest will ever change.

Because I am, and will always be, an oceanographer at heart. <3

[…]

Thou art my love and I am thine;
I drew thee to my Valentine:
The lot was cast and then I drew,
And Fortune said it shou’d be you.

Gammer Gurton’s Garland (1784)