Last week, I was honored with a retirement party, hosted by the UW Information School, as well as a special profile iStory that appeared on the iSchool’s home page.

I was deeply honored by both. My family came from other parts of the country to attend the party so, in the whirl of good company, I’ve hardly had a chance to take it all in.

It’s become more real this afternoon because I am about to step into the classroom for the last time. Over the years, I’ve prepared for my classes by creating my slide deck, then imagining where I want the students to end up when the lecture is over.

I will have done my best in each course — be it operational risk, cybersecurity, enterprise risk, or information ethics, policy, and law — to show the relevance of critical methodologies or frameworks to the world we live in today, with all of its imperfections. I’ve said for a long time that I’ve been training the next generation of risk managers, but I think I would make that same claim in the areas of information assurance and cybersecurity, and certainly ethics as well.

Nothing is quite so gratifying as seeing the look in a student’s eyes when the point is made and the idea becomes clear. I am going to miss that. And I’ll miss the classroom itself, which I think of as an arena in which we do our work.

But I’ll be moving forward with a new podcast series that I hope will involve several former students, and you’ll be hearing more about that in a couple of months. As one door closes, another opens.