Cambridge about to recruit world’s first Lego Professor
The University of Cambridge are currently recruiting for what sounds like every student's dream job - and with a top salary to match!
The Lego Foundation have given Cambridge a weighty £4m to develop their new ‘play’ department at the university.
And no, unfortunately this doesn’t involve investing in a million pound luxury crèche for academics, but rather Lego are sponsoring research into the importance of ‘play’ in early learning in the 21st century.
A massive £2.5m of the cash donated by Lego will be used to pay for a newly-appointed 'Lego Professor of Play' whilst the other £1.5m will go towards the uni’s Pedal Centre (short for ‘Centre for Research on Play in Education, Development and Learning’).
If this hasn’t caught your interest yet, maybe the annual salary will! The successful candidate would be earning a robust £84,000 a year - which is the average salary of Cambridge professors, but the difference is that applicants don’t already need to be holding a professorship to qualify.
What does the job entail?
The job is primarily a research and teaching role at the university, but would also involve running the entire Department of Play (no pressure!).
One example of the kind of research that the Department of Play would be doing is using GPS technology to assess how children interact with each other when they’re left to their own devices in the playground.
Cambridge hope that the information gathered through research on play will be used to develop new learning techniques to ensure children are ‘equipped with 21st Century skills like problem solving, teamwork and self-control’.
The ideal candidate
Cambridge have revealed that the ideal candidate for this role will be an academic who specialises in educational psychology, and must also have the following qualities:
- a ‘childlike mindset’
- Be ‘playful, extremely curious, open-minded, imaginative and creative’
- Be able to come up with new innovative ways of doing research across different disciplines.
Sounds pretty reasonable to us! Unfortunately applications closed on Friday 20th Jan 2017.
Fancy a job as weird and wonderful as this one? Set yourself up nicely by studying one of these bizarre degrees you've probably never even heard of!
