Looking backwards and forwards

Looking back over the past twelve months, I’m not sure that a great deal has changed—the answers to my usual review of the year are more or less the same. I have managed to land a useful ongoing contract for providing membership services, and taken up positions at UKUUG (chairman and director) and MERCi (trustee and director), which are good fun. Apart from that though, I’m still at the University of Manchester—an institution from which I fear I will never escape—still living in Didsbury, still single and still running far too many organisations in Manchester and beyond.

Dropping down (though not out) of my PhD was probably the most painful thing I had to do last year. I felt like a complete failure for doing it, but given that I wasn’t enjoying academia (some parts were fun, but not enough) it was probably the most sensible decision.

Heading into 2009, the first quarter of the year is going to be ridiculously busy: January is taken up by FoE events, February holds a wedding and March is the spring UKUUG conference, which I’m currently writing a draft budget for.

Thesis wise, I’m slowly starting to get there. All six chapters have some content, two finished, three mostly done and one that I’m currently writing. I still have to write four technical reports to back up some of the work which I’ve done, but those require persistence rather than a great deal of thought as they’re mostly describing the detail of the experiments I ran and the code/data behind them. I’m still hoping to have a finished version by the end of this month, although that is looking slightly optimistic now, and to have the final bound copy handed in before I fly off to Alderney in mid-February.

I’m not sure how things are going to pan out in terms of paid work, my aim is still to go freelance full time and hope that my flexibility will be an asset during the recession. Firms probably aren’t going to launch huge recruitment drives, but they still need a certain amount of core work in order to keep afloat, so I think the ability to outsource work on short term contracts will be an advantage. Ideally I’d like to secure a paid non-executive directorship at a small quoted company, which would probably pay enough to cover my living expenses and free me up to spend more time in the voluntary sector (alas, you can’t be paid for being a director in not-for-profit organisations, except under very limited circumstances). I’m not sure how likely that is, but I’m currently scouting around and will probably try applying for a few positions once my thesis has been handed in.