Internal service means the university that employs me, which is UTS since 2016 and the University of Newcastle before that. Two roles take most of the time I give it. As director of the postgraduate project management programs I carry program governance, curriculum quality and accreditation across a graduate certificate and two master's degrees. As the school's higher degree research coordinator I sit in the progression assessments of every research candidate in the school rather than only my own. Both are the largest pieces of internal service I do, and both are set out alongside the work they serve: program direction on the teaching page, research training on the supervision page.
This page is about the rest, which on a CV looks like an undifferentiated run of committee memberships. That is how most of us present it, and part of why it gets discounted by everyone including the people doing it.
Most of it is one case at a time
Look at the roles that remain and a pattern is hard to miss. Responsible academic officer for misconduct in the school since 2024. The graduate research students' appeals committee since 2025. The faculty student assessment review committee in 2017 and 2018. Student academic conduct officer at the University of Newcastle in 2015 and 2016, before I came to UTS. Reviewing examination reports on the faculty research degree committee. These are all points at which a rule written in general terms has to be applied to one person's particular situation, usually a situation that has already gone wrong.
A university's policies describe the standard it intends to hold. The cases decide the standard it actually holds.
That gap is the reason I take these roles seriously and the reason I think they are undervalued. An academic integrity policy can be well drafted and still mean nothing if the people applying it treat every allegation as equivalent, or if they are so reluctant to find against a student that the rule quietly stops existing. The document does not decide which of those happens. The person reading the case does.
Misconduct
The misconduct role is the sharpest version of this. A small number of cases are what people imagine: deliberate, organised and unambiguous. Most are not. Most involve a student who misunderstood a requirement, or ran out of time and made a bad decision in a bad week, or used a tool without knowing where the boundary was drawn in that particular subject. Deciding those cases badly in either direction has real costs. Treating a confused student as a cheat can end a degree that should have continued. Treating a deliberate case as a misunderstanding is unfair to every student who did the work.
The boundary question has become harder rather than easier. I research artificial intelligence in project organisations and I teach students who use these tools daily, and I do not think the sector has settled what appropriate use looks like at the level of a single assessment task. Where the rule is genuinely unclear, the fair response is to say so and to fix the subject's instructions, not to resolve the ambiguity against the student.
Governance
The other half of the record is committee governance: the university academic board in 2022, the faculty board of what was then the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building in 2022 and 2023, and the Faculty of Design and Society board since 2025. Since 2021 I have also been my faculty's representative on the faculty board of the UTS Business School.
That last one has been the most useful, and not for the reason it was intended. Sitting on another faculty's board for five years shows you a comparable unit solving the same problems differently: how they approve curriculum, how they define academic standards, how they decide what industry alignment means in practice. Very little of it is transferable directly. Its value is that it makes you less confident that your own faculty's way of doing something is the way it has to be done, which is a difficult thing to learn from inside one faculty.
The curriculum and quality committees, on faculty curriculum from 2019 to 2022, new product in 2021 and 2022, and teaching and learning quality from 2019 to 2022, sit at the point where a program stops being a design and becomes a set of institutional commitments. That is slower work and much of it is document review, but it is where a good subject either survives approval intact or arrives at students in a form nobody intended.
What it costs
Internal service does not travel. A citation record follows you to another institution and a committee membership does not, which means the incentives point away from this work for anyone who is mobile or ambitious. The load is also distributed badly. It accumulates on the people who say yes, and saying yes several times makes you the obvious person to ask the next time, so the distribution gets worse rather than self-correcting.
Some of it is genuinely low value. There are committees that review documents already settled elsewhere and produce no decision that would not have been made anyway, and time spent in them is simply gone. I have sat in some of those, and I am not going to pretend the whole category is load-bearing because the parts I care about are.
The distinction I now use, and would offer to a colleague deciding what to accept, is whether the role decides something about a person. Misconduct, appeals, assessment review, progression, examination: those roles determine outcomes for individuals, they cannot be done well at speed, and the standard of the institution is set in them one case at a time. Those are the ones worth taking. The rest can wait for someone with a lighter year.