Luigina Ciolfi on giving back, mentoring, and finding your own work-life strategies

Luigina Ciolfi is a full Professor of Human Centred Computing at C3RI – The Cultural, Communication and Computing Research Institute  and member of the Communication and Computing Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University (UK). A common theme of the conversation is her passion for giving back. We talk about peer service organising a conference, and about her early career experiences as a junior faculty with responsibilities for a program, and what sorts of training and support were or could have been useful for her. In giving back now to junior faculty, she also talks about recent training experiences to take a coaching/mentoring approach and the value of this. We then talk about some of her recent research studying how nomadic workers and how work-life balance plays out for them and how there is no one strategy that suits everyone. She reflects on her own strategies here and also on the challenges of working in a different country to your families.BONUS full transcript available here“To keep the good work [of the research community] going it’s only fair that I contribute to it”“Junior faculty struggles are for both men and women.”“Mentoring is just supporting someone to make decisions.”“Balance is not something that everyone aspires to…There’s no strategy that fits everybody.”“Knowing yourself is part of being confident about your strategy and it takes time to know yourself as a professional, to know what you can achieve. It’s a learning curve.”In summary, she talks about (times approximate) …02:00 Discussing the experience of chairing the ECSCW conference and losing a good friend who was going to be the papers co-chair09:15 Talking about her Masters in Siena, Italy and moving to Limerick, Ireland for PhD15:22 Transitioning from student into a faculty position, role of mentors, experience of submitting proposals; early demanding lifestyle of teaching, research etc as an young faculty; early teaching experiences a lot work; wishing she had some shadowing opportunitiesExperiences around learning curve to be a teacher and program director; advice re handling problematic people; wish for training, e.g., mediation training, respectful training language; the meta skills of academia26:45 Most recent course on coaching techniques and mentoring skills; the people skills being important; discussion of most interesting skill/technique – ‘what will happen if’ scenarios to help decision making, helping them think but not giving direct input; how to answer to ‘what would you do’ questions from coaches/mentees32:00 Discusses research on work life balance, the research project that led to this, and the most recent work.  Everyone having different strategies and giving examples of these strategies. Blurring, balance and boundaries.40:50 Discusses differences with academics compared to other professions. Having a lot of freedom, less bound by constraints, having strong ambition and passion, but also a lot of similarities with other knowledge workers. One person’s story about a revelation moment listening to ‘Cats in the cradle’ song, recognising himself in the song, and the trigger to be quit his job and be a freelancer. Rather than giving instruments for balancing we could be giving instruments for re-arranging.47:40 Reflecting on working ‘more than is...

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