So I started my work as an assistant professor yesterday.

The first day was quite uneventful. No big introductions or nomikais (whew!). My supervisor said hi and talked to me for a bit, then the secretary took me around the department and had me sign a large bunch of paper. I got a formal “you are hired” speech from the dean. Then I was shown my own room.

It is a large room, with a great view of Mount Tsukuba from the 8th floor. It is also completely barren and dusty. I felt like the beginning of a “harvest moon” game, when you are left at an abandoned plot of land, to make the best of it that you can. To be honest, I was quite excited about all this — harvest moon is exactly my kind of game.

Today (the second day), was a bit more interesting. My supervisor had some more time, and used some of it to explain what is expected of me in more details. It seems that my job will consist of providing support and managing the G30 initiative in the University of Tsukuba. In more concrete terms, I have to provide intensive courses for the students in the G30 major (for starters Machine Learning in October, High Performance Parallel Computing in December). Also, I have to try and attract more students to this course, both in the university of Tsukuba and other universities in Japan (through long distance classes, etc). Finally, I have to boost the goal of the G30 program to turn Tsukuba into a more International university, by attracting more foreign students, and trying to promote cooperation with other universities abroad.

It is all still a bit nebulous to me, but I can see that I will have a handful.

Oh, research? It seems that I can do pretty much whatever I want in that regard – as long as I find the time to.Today I already took part in an impromptu research discussion about one of the master students projects over coffee, and tried to sell EC to him.

Plans for tomorrow: Cleaning my office by removing the logs and large rocks from it :3