The Last Exam

Today I marked the last exam submissions. It's been ten full cycles, ten years of teaching university students, mainly on international law, but some rogue courses and responsibilities, too. I did:

- three years of Cinema of the British Isles, which was so much fun to teach;

- ethics of innovation course for an online platform, following my profound interest in this area;

- pairing up with a colleague to teach practicalities of legal documents translation;

- workshops on proper formatting of graduates' theses with a huge amount of working on the guidelines, templates, and checking thousands of pages of theses. I am happy to leave this line of work with the legacy of much simplified and automated templates, which improved the quality of theses drastically—it was interesting to notice how basic formatting principles make for enhanced coherence, clearer arrangement of ideas;

- workshops on LLMs for education and consultations, followed by drafting the department-wide policy on this.

If this sounds a bit like a reckoning, like a wistful nostalgia pang, it is a bit of that since I decided to leave my job at the university. There are many reasons for this decision, but I consider a decade of teaching an absolute blessing. Everything that teachers are saying is true—all the good parts, all the bad parts, and I enjoyed this tremendously. I intend to return to teaching at some other point in my life, maybe in a completely different world, forever changed by AIs. A lot of thinking went into this in the past few years—restructuring courses, assignments, and overall approaches to teaching the next generation of students, who don't do much outside of their symbiotic coexistence with AI.

I was invited to teach a new course next semester, but will have to decline. It will be strange to let go of International law, as I feel like I perfected the course, keeping it updated to catch up with the news, with new challenges of the UN and WTO, with the world shaking and breaking apart, and coming back together. This course was in many ways formative for me, a constant in the past decade of my life, an anchor. I feel it's time for me to weigh this anchor and sail to other lands.