Chapter Seventeen
Q is for Quiet
Libraries were nosier places then when she'd been younger, but Stephanie found the stacks of the University of London library were usually quiet except for right before exams. She sat at a carousel doing research for her newest paper on the history of allotments in London. How had these lands, which were used to grow food for the local community, changed over the years? She was also curious how they had contributed to the movement to grow more local and organic food. Where did they get their seeds and funding from? How did they sustain themselves over the long term? Did they sell some their food or was it all eaten by local residents?
Although she spent much of her time engaged in hands on teaching, Stephanie still needed to punish a peer-reviewed paper at least once a year. She didn't write as many papers as some of the other faculty, but the old saying of publish or perish still applied. She knew that the university had to get their research funding from multiple sources. One source of donations came from the name recognition of their most well known faculty. Being a scientist rarely paid well and you were quite unlikely to end up on the cover of TIME, but getting your paper into a well known publication such as Nature brought the university both prestige and funding. After all, everyone needed to get a paycheque, thought Stephanie as she clicked on the index of the next online scientific journal on the screen of her laptop.