Offboarding

Offboarding

These are some thoughts on finally leaving RUB after being employee for 18 years. Those who have some association with Ruhr University Bochum usually know in the design of the campus, there is the architectural concept of the “harbour of wisdom” with the high-tower buildings as ships, although nowadays with the university changing and on-going renovations, some of those “ships” were reconstructed. If you keep this metaphor in mind, I am now setting sail from familiar waters to new horizons.

In retrospect, I will focus on the last six years since my dissertation which I see as one of the turning points. For my dissertation, I conducted a study which relied on manual annotations labeling approximately 40 factors on 7500 sentences. When I finished it, it was clear to me that I wanted to work more into the field of NLP, and leveraging (semi-)automatic methods for text analysis. As we were pursueing to establish a new M.A. study program “Linguistic Data Science”, it also seemed to be a good fit to contribute to the program and teach in it.

There were like many changes to come, teaching a new subject in English, teaching online classes during the pandemic, while the technological progress was moving fast and teaching materials becoming outdated or sometimes not even available on the market. Also, there were challenges as the topic on Social Media Data Mining I had been teaching with a lot of dedication was influenced by changes made to the Twitter platform, which made it impossible to use the API for data collection.

Later, with the emergence of LLMs as the defining moment in AI, which yielded capabilities to understand and generate human language and interact in new ways, it was necessary to address the integration of this technology. In this regard it was getting more and more difficult to determine the authorship of texts, but on the other hand using the technology in teaching AI-assisted programming with Copilot generated meaningful impulses. Also when learning about prompt engineering, we realised new possibilities for data labeling.

Although it has been challenging at times to teach in an international M.A. program, it was a very valuable experience to me. The international students’ individual dedication to their studies impressed me a lot. Also, their feedback, when they have expressed their gratitude for teaching or for support, a message that the course has maybe helped them to get a job, a friendly thank you when they leave the class, was something I had not experienced before in this way. Of course, this is some invisible part of the work, but it meant a lot to me.