I’ve had gastro for a few days, I’m now at the end of it and am feeling much better but it’s been a rough. It’s been a hard few months with too much stress and uncertainty. My tummy and appetite made their objections known to this state of affairs for weeks, so it’s not surprising I’ve been sick.

What is it about being sick that scrapes you not just physically but emotionally raw too? It’s like your body is telling your mind to stop acting like you’re ok and sort it out, which is quite unkind of it really, I mean you already have a lot going on.

In the restructure at work, my position has been made redundant. Fortunately, I’ve been directly matched to a similar position. I really happy with the position I’ve been given, it’s probably my dream job, as much as any job is a dream job. As excited as I am for what’s to come, there’s also realising that I’m losing the job I’ve got now, a job I’ve loved.

When I started at my place of work three years ago, I wasn’t certain where it would all end. I just knew that I’d been given a fresh start and wanted to grasp it with both hands. Who knew I would find my feet among systems and data, and in research output assessment, collection and storage, it’s not exactly where I thought my career would go but there is just something about this work that suited me.

This job has challenged me and allowed me to extend my knowledge of systems and metadata. I’ve learnt how to read xml, use an api and constantly look at the way we do things to make more efficient. In the two years, I’ve tried to learn everything I can about the system, driven by a need to help make this work manageable for the team.

The Scholarly Publications team are some of the best people I’ve worked with. We are agile in our thinking and adaptive to change. We meet every deadline, and make sure our work is of the highest quality. While I can’t say we all love what we do, we seem to share a unique quality of being invested in being really good at it and curious about how to make it better.

With this change, I feel there is a risk that the outstanding work the team has done in the research assessment space will just forgotten about. To the university it’s just a process but to me (and us) it’s years of work: thinking, planning, testing, implementing, training and the hard hard slog of processing 5000+ publications every year.

Can you both be devastated to lose something you love and be excited that the future holds good things? That’s where I am right now. I’m sad that my job that I probably cared way too much about is ending. But I’m also looking forward getting stuck into my new role in the new year.

Managing the stress and uncertainty for the next few months will be a challenge.