Hitchhiking competition, Day 1

There is a hitchhiking competition held every year in Tartu by the university nature preservation club. I participated last year, and since it went unexpectedly well (we got the second place), I was anxious to try it again this year.

The competition is for mixed (boy-girl) pairs, who have 3.5 days to visit as many of the ~40 checkpoints as they can, using only walking and hitchiking as the means of transportation. The competition generally starts on Monday in Tartu and the finish is  on Thursday in the Viljandi Folk Music Festival. To collect a point the pair has to take a photo with at least one member visible along with the object described in the checkpoint description (such as a certain memorial stone or a building). The checkpoints are scattered around all across Estonia, both on the mainland and on the islands, and although they were numbered, the pairs are free to choose the order in which they collected them as well as which points to collect and which to abandon.

This year, I had my girlfriend as my hitchiking partner, which is common, although a pair of two friends seems to be more frequent in a ratio of about 1:2, judging by the 13 pairs on the starting line this year.


The competition started at 10.00 behind the Town Hall in Tartu. We arrived just in time to hear the introductory speech, after which they handed us the roadmap collection, the checkpoint descriptions and a SIM-card for mobile tracking.


Our first order of business was to make some copies of the checkpoint descriptions, as my last year's experience showed that they tend to be very easy to misplace or have damaged accidentally and so it pays to have a few spares. As we also had some errands to run, we decided to split the work. I therefore grabbed the bags and headed to my workplace to do the copying, while T.K. (my gf) headed first to the library and then to grab us both breakfast.

After she joined me with the sandwiches, we decided to head to the southern border of Tartu to try and take 5 of the 7 points in SE-Estonia.

When we got there, we found two pairs on the side of the road already. One of them got picked up ahead of us, but the car that took the other pair also drove a bit further and picked us up as well. We were now two competing pairs in the same car.

The driver was a young man who had graduated high school the year before and had just recently finished military service. He seemed eager to help us and so we wasted no time in explaining that we were competing and needed to visit certain (weird) places. As 3 of the 5 checkpoints (all memorial stones) were on his route, he gladly drove us to all these. He said he would also drop us off to the fourth, but needed to go by her grandmothers to drop something off. Her grandmother, however, lived about 10 km from the 5-th point and once he realized this, he made the following offer: "I'll take you to the 5-th and then back to the 4-th, if you'll share a burger with me in Põlva". This we gladly agreed to.

He had a mutual friend with the girl from the other pair and they talked a while about that. After that it turned out that he was to come to study Computer Science in Tartu, at which point I explained what I do for a living and what he can expect when coming to study in Tartu. By the time he dropped us off at one of the main roads heading back to Tartu, we had managed to collect 5 checkpoints in less than 3 hours, probably putting us ahead of most of the competition.



Getting back to Tartu was also easy, as we were essentially picked up by the first car passing by, which took us directly to the shopping mall on the outskirts of Tartu. We went through the mall to the bus stop and took an inner-city bus (the use of which was also within rules) to the other side of the town.

We now attempted to hitchike north, towards Narva. However, it seemed that our luck had changed and had now abandoned us - there was quite a bit of traffic, but no-one was interested in picking us up. After nearly half an hour of not being picked up, I finally realized what the problem was, however - we were on the side of the wrong road - which led to the right place, but which was marked as a side-road, not the main road by the road maps. Thankfully, the right road was still within walking distance, so after 3 km of walking we were finally in the right place.

There we got picked up pretty quickly. The driver asked where we wanted to go and what we were doing, of course. While trying to answer, we discovered to our horror that we had lost our Estonian Road Atlas that we relied on for navigation -  so we quickly asked the driver to stop and to just drop us to the nearest bus stop.

That was a pretty unsettling experience for us. However, I quickly remembered a similar incident from last year, when my partner had lost her phone near one checkpoint and then had to hitchhike back and was successful in retrieving it. In a similar vain, I recommended that T. go back alone as a lone girl without bags tends to be picked up more quickly. She agreed and did indeed get a ride quite quickly. Soon after I got a phone call from her saying that she had indeed found the roadmaps and was now on her way back.

In another 5 minutes she already said she was in a car and told me to prepare our bags. It turned out she had been picked up by a family van driving back home. We asked them about the next checkpoint (which was a fence made out of old skis), one of the children said he had seen it once, but could not remember the location. They told us that they could not drive us all the way, but dropped us off at a crossing about 3/4 of the way there.

What followed was probably the longest wait during our whole trip, as we did not get picked up for nearly 3 hours and managed to walk nearly 6 km before finally getting a car. Not a total loss, though, as we passed by a herd of cows while walking, netting us an extra point for "a lone cow on the side of the road".

We were eventually picked up by an executive of VKG, one of the biggest private energy providers in Estonia. Despite his stern looks, he was very helpful and agreed to drive us through Kasepää and help search for the ski fence. The fence, however, was nowhere to be found. On contacting the organizers, it turned out we weren't the only ones with the problem and that the fence was probably in another Kasepää, 30 km south. This was a bit too far off the road, however, so we decided to just continue northwards in the same car.



He dropped us off at the Tallinn-St.Petersburg highway, just north of Kohtla-Järve, where we arrived just as the sun was setting. We thanked him and then put our thumbs up again, this time moving towards Narva. Despite the bad reputation of Tallinn-St.Petersburg highway among hitchikers, we were picked up in a matter of minutes.

The man who had taken us aboard was quite friendly, but there was a small problem of a language barrier. Most people in NE-Estonia are native russian-speakers, originally from other parts of the Soviet union. As for us, both me and T. have both learned some russian in school, but since neither of us has had to use it much, we were both fairly rusty, being able to communicate only the most basic things. Most of the car ride was therefore spent in silence.

Before entering Sillamäe (about 7 km short of our destination), we started thinking on what to do next. The sun had set completely and it was quite dark. We were in NE estonia, which has a reputation for a high crime rate. It seemed that the sensible course would be to find some lodging. We therefore said we wanted to go to hotel. The driver smiled and said he would gladly drop us off at hotel "Krunk".

Entering the hotel, we realized why he had smiled - hotel Krunk was a fancy, 3, maybe even 4-star hotel, with rooms going for 60 eur - a bit out of our budget range (which he could easily tell considering how we dressed and travelled). We therefore started discussing alternatives.

According to the map, there was one other place in Sillamäe called hostel "Oravake". However, I remmembered I had heared about that from Taiji friends of mine - who had always described it fondly as a "complete hellhole". For me, that would have been a good reason to visit - just to see how bad it could be - but T. persuaded me to keep on hitchiking and try to reach our checkpoint in Sinimäe.

Walking out of Sillamäe, we were both struck by its beauty. It was a soviet city, but built in the beginning of the era, with remarkably beautiful buildings and wide roads with plenty of greenery. Quite surprising for us, since we had been stuck in the stereotypes of NE being the backwater of Estonia.

We got to the side of the road and raised our thumbs. And then burst in laughter, as it dawned on us what we were doing. It was 11 PM, completely dark (save for the streetlights) and we were hitchhiking in what is reputably the highest crime rate area in Estonia. I commented that "I would not pick us up if I was a driver passing by here!".

Thankfully, not everyone thought the way I did and within half an hour, we were picked up by a mild mannered older russian man, driving home to Narva. He gladly dropped us off by the Sinimäe sign, from where it was maybe half a km walk to the village.

The place itself seemed nearly deserted, and the checkpoint (a memorial cross for the battle in Sinimäe - one of the bloodiest battles in WW2 in Estonia) was nowhere to be found. Neither was the hostel reputed to be in the village by the roadmap.

However, we were again very lucky - as we stumbled to a museum, and the light was on in the ground floor. We knocked on the door and a middle-aged man answered us - IN ESTONIAN. We quickly explained our situation and asked about both the cross and the hostel. He explained that the hostel we were looking for was to the north near the coast, maybe 5-6 km away, but that the cross was indeed nearby, maybe 2 km to the west, and he gladly gave us directions there. The battery of my phone (that doubled as our GPS) had run out, so I asked if I could leave it to charge while we went to take the checkpoint, and he agreed, asking us to be back in an hour or so.

We therefore continued walking, in darkness without streetlights and with dogs barking on both sides of the road - until we came to a bus stop that did not have a name printed on it. And then past that, to a cemetery. And sure enough - it was midnight. We knew that the cross was nearby, but in darkness it was impossible to find. We headed back to the museum.

The guardian was still there, and explained that we should have turned back from the bus stop and had literally stopped maybe just 100 m from the cross - which we would have definitely seen if it's lighting had been on. At that point, however, we were too tired to go there again so we decided to call it a night and try in the early morning.

The man showed us a spot on the museum lawn where he thought it should be good to camp, and also showed us to the bathroom where we refilled our water supply. We thanked him dearly and then set off to erect the tent.

We failed, however. The tent, which I had borrowed from a friend, seemed to be a standard two-arc tent, but for some reason, we could not get the arcs to bend properly. As we were dead-tired, we decided to just let it be, put one part of the tent under us, another over us, pinned both down so they would not move and then climbed between them in our sleeping bags, hoping to get a few hours of sleep before continuing.

What I've done

Many people have recently asked me, what is it exactly that I have been doing for the past year, and most importantly, what have I managed to accomplish in this period. To be honest, I did not have a good answer to it for quite some time, as days are generally filled with many small things and in a day-to-day hassle it is often hard to see the bigger picture.

Yesterday me and my boss, the vice-head of the institute in charge of teaching, went for a dinner to discuss just this matter: what we had and had not accomplished in the year that we have had our positions. This post is mainly based on this discussion. What follows is a short summary of the things I have headed or been strongly involved in.

Curricula

• New Bachelor's curriculum - it took a better part of the year discussing it with different parties and playing with different ideas, but I believe that what we came up with in the end is pretty much optimal - both in terms of course selection and how they are distributed to the semesters. One thing I did find when working with it though was that our previous two curricula (which we combined into one) were already pretty good - especially compared to the curriculum I was on when I started - so the new curriculum, although considerably better planned out, represents only a modest step forward, as there is just so much you can do on a curriculum level. 
• New Master's curriculum - while the new Bachelor's curriculum was built up from scratch, the new master's curriculum is much more similar to the previous one, with just some minor modifications - which is reasonable as the master's curriculum allows for more specialization and freedom of choice and as such needs much less central planning and regulation. Again, I believe that what we have now presents a modest improvement over previous state of affairs, which was well worth the time spent on it.
• Information about the curricula - I spent quite a bit of time in the beginning of the year figuring out what order the courses should best fit in the current curricula and how to present this information to the students, and talking with the lecturers about whether the proposed changes suited them. It seems that this worked and information is now in an accessible place and students are aware of it and can see what courses they should be taking on the semesters to come.
  
  I did make my first big mistake as a curriculum manager on this task, though. Namely, I managed to send all the first year CS students to a course that most have difficulty even on their second year. Sadly, I found this out too late, so as a result, many flunked and lost some of their motivation. How big the losses are, is still a bit early to say, but we will see that soon enough.
• Internal review of curricula -  University of Tartu has an internal curriculum review process where every 3 years the curriculum managers have to answer a set of self-assessment questions to make them think about what is and is not working in their curriculum and how to improve things.  I started my job just as this process was commencing again, and had to write this self-assessment. Thankfully, having quite recently graduated the curriculum and knowing the faculty and students pretty well, this was not hard - and did make me think about a few aspects I had neglected before.
• Personnel planning - as the curriculum manager, one of my main responsibilities is teaching planning, i.e. managing who teaches what and what courseload everyone has (i.e. how much everyone teaches). This had to be done both for the year running, and in our case also for the year to come, as the new curriculum means major changes and these needed to be planned out to see if everything would fit. There was also an aspect of strategic management, as our institute is expanding and we needed to figure out what types of courses would need more teaching assistants and how many of them - both now and in the few years to come. 

Supervision

• Seminar supervisors - we pioneered a new process where all the 100 students wishing to graduate were divided between 7 faculty supervisors so each had about 15 students to supervise, with whom they held bi-weekly seminars. This centralized the supervision process, as all the details about deadlines, requirements and recommendations now needed to be communicated initally only to 7 people. Many were skeptical of the idea at first, but I would attribute all of the 20% increase in the number of students defending this year to this change. Student feedback is also highly positive and the 7 supervisors were also mostly positive about the experience, most saying they would try to do a few things differently and better next year. In short, this process is likely to continue into the future, and will provide for a basis of a solution that scales even if we get 150 students wishing to defend.
• Reading all the thesis abstracts - our faculty has a rule where students need to submit the problem statement ("abstract") of their thesis about 3 months before they have to present the whole thesis. Normally, this is just a formality and no-one reads them, which seemed a bit absurd to me - so as the curriculum manager, I decided to take it on me to read through all of them and give students feedback in terms of how complicated their chosen topic is with respect to the expected ("average") level of theses.
  
  The abstracts made for some interesting reading, but it was often quite hard to judge the level of complexity. Also, having to write feedback to nearly 100 abstracts took disproportionately much time and I doubt the feedback I gave made much difference in most cases. As a measure of balancing the level of theses and making the grades more predictable, this approach is probably not the most reasonable. The problem was actually solved by seminar supervision - as students saw in the seminars what others were doing and thus could judge the level of their work on their own, probably better than I could. As such - it was worth trying but it will not be repeated. 

• My own 15 students - in order to make the process change easier, I decided to also be one of the 7, this despite only having supervised one master's student and no bachelor's students before. Most of them had a second supervisor to help with the content, so my main job was the presentation i.e. the thesis writing. Sadly, despite setting some intermediate milestones with deadlines, most students started writing very late, maybe a week or two before the deadline. This provided for a very intensive weekend before the deadline, where I was reading 11 theses in different stages of disrepair. In total, 10 of them made it to the defense - resulting in 2 A, 6 B and 2 C -s. 

Work with students

• My courses - I had just two - "Introduction to informatics" in the spring, and "Graphs" in the fall - both 2 x 2h per week. First one was mainly based on guest lectures and as such involved a lot of organizing. Second one was a small-group course with 10 students, which was a challenge since it was my first time giving lectures, and I also experimented with pair-learning by assigning students in random pairs in the practicals and then having them solve problems together. The experiment was a success, as students seemed to like it and the results were a bit better than past years.
• First year student conference - this year, we had a student conference for first-year students (together with the faculty of natural sciences and technology), where the goal was to motivate their studies and introduce them to everything the university has to offer. In general, it went very well, but the main problem was a very low turnout rate as only very few students bothered to show up, possibly due to bad choice of time. Hopefully, this year will be better, as a more suitable time was chosen for the coming autumn.
• Student councilor - during most of last year, I also had an appointment as the student councilor, which meant 2 hrs each week in a room on the ground floor where students could come to with their problems and questions. Truth be told, there was not much demand, as Student Tutors do the same job and probably just as well or even better.
• "Homework seminar" - this was an idea to try to help students who were having trouble with their coursework by having a set time once a week where students could come and receive help with any coursework that caused them trouble. One person was there most every time, sometimes 2-4, and all who came did get help and usually came again, but doing something like this for just one person is not effective enough to be worth it. We will continue this, but in some other form. maybe in the student lobby, and in the middle of the day instead of after classes, to improve accessibility. 

Work with the faculty

• Teaching seminar with the new TA-s - probably one of the biggest impact factor things I have done in the past year was the weekly seminar I ran with all the teaching assistants where the aim was to support one-another in the first year of teaching. Teaching is initially quite hard, and I realized that with 8 new teaching assistants being hired, it would be good to find a way to give them some support with their teaching.
  
  When I began, I got it from Anne Villems, who is somewhat of an adoptive grandmother for me and constantly cheered me on, even when I was doing really bad at teaching. If not for her, I would have quite probably quit, but since she helped me on, I wanted to pay it forward. I even went to a mentoring course, but quickly realized I could not play quite the same role as Anne did for me - lacking the required experience. Nevertheless, something had to be done, and I decided to play on the idea of a support group - which worked quite well for the first semester, as TA-s came and discussed teaching, both the problems and the ideas for improvements they were having.
  
  It was incredible watching people develop in their understanding of teaching and also seeing their skills clearly and visibly improve. My role in the whole thing was to keep this going, as the group itself was who did most of the work. However, it seemed that the seminar was crucial in keeping the motivation to teach well, both for me and for many of the TA-s, and many of the participants got very into the topic because of it.
  
• Teaching seminar with the senior faculty - this was an idea we copied from physics institute, which had been holding the teaching seminar for half a year by then. The seminar met once a month and it was more structured than the TA seminar, always having a topic and generally also having some basis for the discussion.
  
  This seminar did not work as well as hoped, probably due to my own priorities being often elsewhere, resulting in me leading the seminar with very little preparation. As time progressed, fewer and fewer people showed up, although with those who did, it generally led to quite practical and insightful discussions and I found I had quite a bit to learn from my older colleagues. We also organized a peer review process with the participants, which it might be useful to introduce to the rest of the faculty as well. In short, it could have worked better, but it was still quite helpful, especially if something similar is continued in the future.
• Recruiting young TA-s from Bachelor's students - one of the main problems in our faculty is that our most talented students are steered away from careers in academia by going to work in the private sector, often in their second year of studies. In an attempt to remedy this situation (along with the shortage of teaching faculty) we decided to offer some of the best bachelor's students a part-time position as teaching assistants for the first year programming course.
  
  We interviewed 8 of the most promising candidates, giving me my first experiences of job interviewing. All 8 were quite different, but they all have potential to be very good teachers. One of the more senior TA-s will hold a weekly seminar with them (akin to the TA seminar I held) next semester. In general, I am very optimistic, especially in that this is a very good way of retaining talent and guiding them towards a career in teaching - something society badly needs right now.

Institute advertisment

• Advertisment materials - I also wrote or helped write quite a bit of advertisment materials, both for the CS curriculum as well as for the faculty as a whole. Although I do not pride myself in being a great writer, I do tend to produce quite good text quite quickly (once even surprising one of my colleagues by managing to write a small 400-word column about TEDx for the university magazine in exactly an hour) and as very few others are interested in writing in our faculty, people often come to me when something needs writing, and are rarely disappointed with the result. 
• School visits  - I had the honour of visiting nearly a dozen schools in the past year to tell the students there about why University of Tartu is a good place to study and why Computer Science matters. Half of these visits were with a mathematician colleague of mine (which were more about math and CS), whereas the other half were with the prorector of Teaching (being more about UT in general). As both my co-presenters were very interesting people and good at what they do, I had a lot to learn, both at presentations and in drives there and back. 

Quite a bit, when looking back on all of it.

In any case, now it is time for a vacation. Back in august.