I’m writing this blog post in the middle of graduation season. Seeing all the students finish their time at university, and talking with them about the tumultuous last few years and their plans for the future has made me muse a little about how they (and I) have experienced time.

Students talk about time in a linear fashion, and I suspect that this is because they experience it as such: year one, year two, year three, graduation, then life beyond university (or perhaps postgraduate study). Indeed every step of their course has been planned to build upon the previous one, so how could they not think about their university in linear, sequential terms?

As a member of staff, however, and particularly as one who is gaining a little more experience of management and planning (and thus a broader sense of what is happening across the institution), I’m gradually losing any sense of linear progression. Rather, it feels like time is circular, or maybe – if I’m being as precise as I can – spiralling.

As the 2019 cohort graduate, I’m attending meetings about recruitment for the 2023 cohort, and planning third-year teaching for the 2021 cohort. In a single day, I might teach a first-year undergraduate, an MLitt student, and someone on the brink of handing in their PhD. Each student is at some point on their path, but I am moving between all these points: the PhD might come before the first year, and I might think about something to do with admissions while talking to the MLitt student.

Constantly keeping lots of different plates spinning is an obvious part of a lecturer’s job. But the way it changes your perception of time is less obvious. Because I am interacting with different sequential points more or less simultaneously, I find it hard to put myself into the position of a student pursuing their own linear trajectory. Instead my sense of a yeargroup and my knowledge of a student end up becoming separate from each other: I don’t think of my tutee X as a third-year, but as my tutee X; and I don’t think of specific students when planning a third-year module, but rather of a kind of aggregated, ideal image of a third-year cohort, based on all the third-years I’ve known.

I wonder if other teachers think like this, or if this happens to anyone in a job with a kind of circular rhythm to it. My work on admissions is particularly odd in this respect, because the start of one recruitment cycle overlaps with the end of another, so time is compounded within a single role.

To return to something I mentioned earlier: this post, for reasons of precision, should really talk about spiralling time rather than circular time when discussing my experience. After all, time does not stand still for me, and still progresses in a linear way: I am a little older each time I meet a new set of first-years, even if some of what I’m doing is similar to what I’ve done in the past. I am not immune to time, although the repetitions and the necessary leaping between different stages does sometimes induce that feeling, of being somehow, somewhere outside time.