The Timetabling Manager at the University of York resigned at the end of February 2023.
Announcing the news on LinkedIn, Sarah Wood said “I’m going to be sad to leave such a great team, colleagues and friends…a huge thank you to everyone I’ve worked with over the past fourteen years!”
She posted a link to the job advertisement for her position, which has now been filled.
According to jobs.ac.uk, the role had a salary between £42,155 to £51,805 per annum and was a full time, permanent position.
Wood is now moving on to work as a consultant for Escentral, a service which seeks to support and train timetabling and space management professionals in the Higher Education sector.
The end of an era for the essential administration department we all forget about…
Have you ever wondered how you end up with a timetable for your course? Think about the number of lectures, seminars, workshops, practical’s, tutorials, supervisor meetings and examinations that take place. Then multiply that by the number of students at the University. As of this academic year, that amounts to 20,735 people (the majority being undergraduates, 15,195).
We all require lecture theatres, seminar rooms, labs and other spaces, all at certain times in the weeks of term – these all need to be allocated and booked out perfectly so that there are no clashes.
Don’t forget all the summer exams too – those of us that take them all need rooms (or at least dates and times in our timetables if they don’t take place in person) so that we know exactly when and where they are and can (hopefully) not fail them.
It is a mammoth task, and it is therefore no surprise that there is an entire team of timetabling staff who work full time, around the clock, to ensure that you can do your course here at York. Admittedly, if you’re a humanities student like me, you may struggle to understand just how crazy this challenge is (given that it feels like we average about one contact hour a week), but if you’re a STEM student, you’ll probably get what I mean.
This change is coinciding with the University moving from a term based system to a semester system as of this September. The resignation is therefore happening at an interesting time for the administrative department.
From a standard three terms per academic year, which has historically been the way that York, and many other UK Universities have operated, courses from this September onwards will be taught in two main teaching blocks (slightly like American semesters) that will run from September 2023 to January 2024, and from February 2024 to June 2024.
While this won’t by any means mean chaos for your timetables (given how long this plan for semesterisation has been in place), this will certainly be an interesting administrative switch up for the new timetabling manager.