Friday, December 23, 2011

The End of The Year

One year ago, I was wrapping up my education at Emporia State University.  I had finished and delivered my capstone, and walked at graduation.  A lot has happened since that point.

The job I spoke of in my last post never gave me a start date--they still had intention to, but the background check took inordinately long for reasons beyond my control.  I was offered a different position in the meanwhile, and accepted it.  It's full time regular work for the State, which is a bit more stable than the contract position I had been waiting on.  The position title is "statistical analyst", but I got the impression that the work would be more oriented toward database and spreadsheet management, and the manipulation of data and information to extract and synthesize reports.  Needless to say, I am in disbelief that I found such an awesome position--digital information is kind of my thing.

(Note: when people ask you what you do with studies/degree in Computational Linguistics and/or Library Science, this is what you do with it.  You manage and analyze digital text, information, and databases.  This work is not highly specific to any one career field--just about every business or organization has information or databases and a need for someone to maintain and interpret them.)

I have to say, I was hoping to be "back by popular demand" in academia by this time, but it hasn't happened. I've been busy trying to get a stable job, and thereafter house shopping with my husband and thinking about coordinating the move.  We haven't found a house yet.

I published two books this year so far, and plan to publish one more before January.  That's something to be proud of.