ALL IN A DAY'S WORK: Dr Mary Meaney, Director, IT Blanchardstown

E-mail and snail mail take up most of my morning as I'm bombarded with issues from the campus and the wide world of Irish education. The range of areas that I touch on in a day is vast - national educational policy, budgeting and finance, preparations for the coming academic years, retention, access, raising the profile of the sector - all the normal activities of an IT director, plus the particulars of developing a new campus from scratch.

The Institute of Technology Blanchardstown has only been in existence since 1999, so we're still very involved in the physical development of the campus and the planning of our academic programmes. We have 2,000 students already, between full and part-time, but we are still in our infancy.

We had a head start on the direction of the institute, thanks to the work of the strategic review, but we are continually talking to businesses and the community about what they need from their institute. We're very conscious that we don't simply replicate what's already out there in terms of higher education, we have to be relevant to the people and the industry here in Blanchardstown.

After lunch I have a meeting with the council of directors of the 13 ITs. The sector is facing challenging times with the changing economic situation and student profile. I find it very exciting - education can lead to change in good times and bad, and how we deal with the challenges of the coming years will dictate economic development well into the future.

There are thousands of Irish people out there who missed out on the opportunity to gain a qualification when they left school. It's our responsibility to accommodate these people, especially now that the number of school leavers is set to fall. I'm looking forward to helping to create new kinds of education for new kinds of students.

In the late afternoon I do a press interview. It's the role of the institutes to sell themselves to the public and I'm happy to do that. We're working together to communicate our good news stories to the media. You can't control what's reported and sometimes the news is not good, but we have a responsibility to talk to the public, and the media is the most effective channel for that.

My last meeting of the day is with the management here at IT Blanchardstown to plan for the academic intake of September 2004. It's tricky to plan so far ahead when the economic situation is changing so rapidly, but we have to strike a balance between the needs of industry and the overall development of the students. Flexibility is the most important skill you can gain - it's impossible to know where your career will take you. Look at me: I studied science at a undergraduate level and then went on to do a PhD in chemistry. Now I'm director of an IT that doesn't even offer a science programme.

To foster their "soft skills", we try to get the students involved in sports and social events at the institute, although it's hard when so many of them are working part-time. We have excellent sporting facilities here on campus. I gaze out my window with longing at the Abbotstown site - I'm dying for the chance to have a swim!

In conversation with Louise Holden