A year of maternity leave passed both quickly and very slowly, and in less than a month I am back to work full-time. It was out of my comfort zone to stop working and, before Emilia arrived, I was worried about how I’d adjust to my new stay-at-home mum life. Now, I have to figure out how to re-enter “il mondo del lavoro”, “the world of work” as Italians say it, having new responsibilities and a new life, really.
From the beginning of September 2022 until the end of August 2023, I am on maternity leave. While I am not yet a parent (still waiting), I have already logged off/passed my duties at work and completed ongoing academic commitments from postdoc times. I do not commit to any mentoring or academic activities until the end of February 2023.
Since May, I work as a Qualitative UX Researcher at WhatsApp, and I wanted to share my interview experience and the resources I found useful during the preparation.
Since last November, I have been reflecting on my research career. I started my second postdoc, and I didn't want to stay postdoc for too long. I see postdoc as some sort of limbo. You gain experience, improve your publication record and try to check all the boxes necessary for the next step while staying on short-term contracts and most probably relocating to have international experience.
In July 2021, we launched an online user study on digital COVID-19 immunity certificates in the Republic of Ireland. The study design included an initial online screening survey with a random prize draw among those who completed it (20 euro Amazon voucher), which attracted a bot attack with a massive number of fraudulent survey responses threatening the integrity of our screening survey. In this post, I describe the challenge and suggest strategies to mitigate or even avoid it for future studies.
Ethics approval is an important and inevitable stage in any human-computer interaction research project. The evaluation time of the ethics of our crisis-response COVID-related research proposals was a long wait. While the pandemic is an exceptional time with quickly changing situations that require rapid response, in the end, it was well worth the wait and important not only for academics but for ... everyone. Why?
