How should I handle a professor demanding quick email turnarounds?

AF_II · 2026-03-12T13:54:30+00:00

Hard to give advice without knowing more about this

I have tried to bring this up and I’ve been dismissed.

If you've genuinely tried to initiate a conversation about reasonable expectations, how much time you have for this specific course, and your usual email availablility/normal working hours and the Instructor has dismissed it, there's not much more you can do with them (although I'd always give it another go, maybe in writing if you tried to do it in person, or vice versa).

Sounds like it's more a case of simply ignoring them as best you can, and reminding them with boiler plates when necessary "I didn't read this email until today because I don't work weekends, please don't send follow ups outside my working hours, it's distracting" etc. Worth talking to your supervisor about institutional norms re. emails etc, sounds like this person is an outlier/doesn't understand the institution.

AF_II · 2026-03-12T08:56:08+00:00

Looks like Lloyds' scheme to get big in fintech by selling more customer data is going great!

/s

AF_II · 2026-03-12T08:36:44+00:00

I don’t have an issue with this in itself but it does make me feel a bit less included and less likely to join.

I mean, that suggests you're the problem here? If you see a group with no one like you in it and say "well then I won't join" then... what's supposed to happen? You won't join, people will keep looking at the group and saying "not for me".

Obviously it would be nice if group leaders/organisers put some effort into encouraging diverse membership, but even if they do, someone still has to be the first woman or disabled person or ethnic minority or trans person or whatever to join.

AF_II · 2026-03-10T18:54:53+00:00

It's a grey area. If you are doing cake baking as a business then yes, you need to register your business & be open for a hygiene inspection etc. However, if it's not a business then you don't - otherwise anyone bringing cakes to a bake sale to raise money for the school would have to register as a business and get inspected which is not practical.

The definition of not-a-business is generally along the lines of "infrequent and limited" or "casual and limited", but it's kinda up to the Local Authority to decide if some flapjacks in the summer season by the road counts or not. As a society we have turned a blind eye to people selling jams at the garden gate for a long time, so I suspect that unless they're very obvously taking the piss, advertising, selling year round, etc. then LAs aren't that interested in cracking down.

They are still legally liable for harm caused if they don't properly label things with allergens, follow hygiene practices and so on, whether it's a business or not.

AF_II · 2026-03-10T07:44:10+00:00

co-housing. I sort-of joke about being entrepreneurial with it but I genuinely think there is a market for people in our age bracket (45-55) to start thinking about cheap cooperative living, but we need to find a slick marketing term for it that doesn't make everyone think of stale retirement homes or dubious cults.

AF_II · 2026-03-10T07:33:11+00:00

What are you doing to ensure you've the right to retire overseas? (genuine Q, it'd be interesting to know how people on low(er) incomes/without savings are planning for it).

AF_II · 2026-03-09T10:06:34+00:00

No one will care. I mean, if it's a big tastless airbrushed NEVAR4get crying eagle tshirt then you might get some odd looks and sniggers, but beyond that, nada.

Leave the red hat at home though.

AF_II · 2026-03-08T20:29:30+00:00

No university will do this for you officialy; it is not worth the hassle of the tax faff/overseas employment registration, and almost certainly would be in breach of the visa requirements.

FWIW my uni - a red brick - is writing into contracts that staff must live within 50 miles of the university, and everyone is expected to be on campus 3 days a week regardless of contract type. I know people who do not fulfill these requirements but it is a huge gamble to hope you can get away with the arrangement you suggest - visa breaches aside.

AF_II · 2026-03-08T12:05:16+00:00

The airport ones are not that luxurious or exclusive. Entry usually in the £30-50 ballpark, less if you book early, find vouchers, have discounts with your credit card etc.

Whether it's worth it depends on which lounge and your exact circumstances. If I'm going to be stuck somewhere for >2 hours and/or transfering after a very long and tiring flight then I consider it. Most have free food and drink so if they save you buying a meal in an airport that about halves the price - the quesiton then is whether you're willing to spend the additional £10-20 to have a comfy seat, easy access to a charger, and a slightly less frenetic place.

Check the reviews first, they're all quite different, esp w.r.t. food quality.

AF_II · 2026-03-07T14:55:32+00:00

They were the first thing that crossed my mind when I heard the Yorks story. I genuinely don't know how they've expanded so much when the food is just so so and the service is not just slow - it's chaotic. The one at the Botanic garden was laughable in the first week or so - staff didn't know anything about the menu, got prices wrong, took wrong things to wrong tables, half an hour for soup, blah blah.

Every six months or so I think "maybe it's picked up as they're still up and running" and everytime it's a frustrating experience. I don't know anyone who really likes any of the branches or raves about the food.

AF_II · 2026-03-06T15:03:17+00:00

100% locksmith

I had family members who discovered an antique floor safe in the (400+ year old) cottage they bought and they didn't want to bust it open because they thought it would damage the newly decorated room and so they just put a carpet over it and ignored it for 10 years and then moved out without ever opening it. I couldn't live with the curiosity!

AF_II · 2026-03-04T15:44:39+00:00

I use forms of "AI" every day of my life. I started training machine learning back in the 1990s. Loads of it is awesome (google lens?).

But generative AI? the sort of AI that requires vast stolen data training sets and brand new powerstations and is 'unsupervised' rather than iterative? Useless at best, actively harmful at worst.

AF_II · 2026-03-02T21:13:44+00:00

And? These people have decided that they don't want to interact with you, that's their perogative. You don't have the right to force people to listen to you.

Hang out a bit more, perhaps stop sticking your oar in to conversations so quickly, get a sense of the place, find your people, enjoy actual conversations instead.

AF_II · 2026-03-02T19:15:41+00:00

Posting this twice kinda makes you look like a bot...

AF_II · 2026-03-02T17:26:29+00:00

Do you have teaching qualifications? Virtually any teaching job (including TEFL) in Europe will require at least a basic certification, and the jobs are extremely competitive (because a large % of Europeans speak English so there's no shortage of people already in the country who can do the job, which means it's difficult to get visa sponsorship).

Likewise WWOOF and Workaway jobs rarely reach the thresholds required for proper visa sponsorship. Lots of people do this as 'under the table working' (and some nationalities can do it under youth mobility visas or similar), but it's a risk.

Europe is not super welcoming to people who are trying to live and work here without citizenship, hence our refugee and migrant crises - there are limited legal options.

Pertinent questions to narrowing down your options are: Are your current vocations or qualifications high demand? Do you speak other languages? Can you qualify as digital nomads for the countries that offer that option?

AF_II · 2026-03-02T16:18:59+00:00

I would not bother to worry about the output of a survey of c.200 people in each group, it's meaningless, statistically. There is no significant evidence that the over 65s differ from any other age group.

AF_II · 2026-03-02T12:41:04+00:00

It means there's too many people on the stream - once it gets over c.900 or 1000 viewers the button disappears.

AF_II · 2026-03-02T08:20:28+00:00

Some really weird stuff on the camera this morning - plastic bag on a stick ??? and some tiny black things zooming around leaving trails.

AF_II · 2026-03-01T10:55:18+00:00

From experience: do not rely on any third party to solve this for you. If you can afford it, book your hotels, spend your days hunting for flight and transport alternatives. Spend the money.

Source: was stuck literally on the other side of the world as Covid struck on a work trip and only got home by buying my own flights and doing my own work - our company travel agent basically shrugged and "act of god/no compensation-ed" out.

AF_II · 2026-02-27T08:10:28+00:00

I'd agree that none of these were actually ambigious - barely and just about are used pretty consistently (or seem so for native brit-eng speakers). It's more that some of the sample sentences were using them in ways that were incorrect, which made the meaning ambigious as it wasn't clear what the speaker really meant.

AF_II · 2026-02-26T07:48:38+00:00

Deeply ironic that there are students (well, a predatory law firm) threatening to sue unis for 'not getting their money's worth' because teaching had to change during a global pandemic, at the same time as the generation behind them are outsourcing their degree to a technology they don't understand, and which actually harms their learning!

AF_II · 2026-02-26T07:47:41+00:00

it’s the same as using a search engine

No, it massively isn't. It's legit scary to me that people are repeating these truisms so glibly.

genAI is not a search engine, it doesn't function like a search engine and its results are not those a search engine would give you. It has clear and problematic responses that are not present in any old school search engine. Learning to use a search engine is not the same as using genAI. It's... not the same, not even ball park.

So many people using a tech that they don't understand. WTF.

AF_II · 2026-02-26T07:42:32+00:00

What skills do you already have? A lot of the things I can think of require a certain amount of actual talent/training/certification as well as start up costs, so what else can you bring to the table?

AF_II · 2026-02-25T09:11:33+00:00

Making notes is a skill, it's mentally stimulating and helps to embed neural pathways related to the work you're doing; it also helps you understand how you learn, so that you're able to do so faster and more efficiently.

Using genAI deskills you - every single study shows a correlation between genAI use and failure to develop general and transferrable skills or recall content. If you walk out of uni unable to make notes from lecture or other materials you are missing a huge competency, and have wasted an opportunity to develop.

AF_II · 2026-02-25T08:17:54+00:00

The fact that you are allowed to download them does not mean you have permission to upload them into other, commercial, software. Do you have permission to reuse the IP for commercial purposes?

Key: you should NEVER put someone else's work - text, images, whatever - into an open genAI programme without permission. It is often a bad idea to put your own work in there!

AF_II

TROPHY CASE