My Working Day: Prof Orla Muldoonis head of the Department of Psychology at the University of Limerick.
Previously, I was in a well-established academic department in Queens University in Belfast, so the move to a new psychology department here in Limerick has been an adjustment.
In total, I had lived and worked in Northern Ireland for 17 years, so it feels like I've just landed in a different culture. The education system is different and so too the tax system, and, professionally, the role here is much more challenging.
The department has been up and running for six months, and there was effectively no psychology department when I arrived, just a greenfield site.
There was a huge nervousness making the transition, but things have settled down now a little and I've gotten to know the lay of the land. Typically I'm up early in the morning to drop our two kids to locations near the university.
First thing when I get into the office, like most people, is to check e-mails. After that I might have some teaching, either with our own psychology students, or students in medicine or physiotherapy departments.
The mainstay of my work at the moment is organising our own degree programme here. That's also the main difference between my work here and at Queen's. As head of department, I need to ensure that our degree here gets through the proper accreditation process for a psychology degree. So it has to be planned correctly to ensure that the 25 students on the course come out with a well- grounded psychology education.
I have less time for my own research naturally, and am tending to look at the bigger picture more. There are currently four academic staff in the department and about eight other workers as well.
We are currently advertising for more posts and the department will continue to get bigger. Aside from forward planning, there is also the work of dealing with student issues as they arise on a day-to-day basis, and this can be pretty unpredictable. I usually finish at around 6pm in the evenings, but nearly always bring work home with me. I don't think that's unusual in the academic world. Often it will be reading material or keeping up with research.
And then there is overseas work; for instance, I just arrived back from California yesterday, where I attended a research workshop. Often you could be invited to speak on the subject of ethics and politics, so that can mean time out of the office and I do engage in voluntary work as well.
Overall, I'm happy with the move, but as a psychologist I would say that I am excited by the future, and while there is a degree of anxiety present, I prefer to interpret it as excitement.
The luxury of arriving in an academic department and effectively having a blank canvas has been enormous.
It's no great secret that academia can be driven by egos, with everyone seeing their own area of research as of primary importance. Here, we have been able to hand pick our staff and also to consolidate the interests of those staff in line with the focus of the department.
In Queen's, the departments were established and had their areas of expertise well marked.
In selecting the staff for permanent posts here we have been able to get a good number of people that did similar things. So we can try to consolidate a particular area of research, for instance social psychology. This allows us build a unique research centre, and I'm glad to play a part in that.