I was unemployed for a whole 16 hours.
My lecturing contract officially expired at midnight last night, and I spent most of today procrastinating on revising my CV to send to HR for them to put it in their giant bin of potential temp manpower. At 4pm I decided I was being ridiculous procrastinating on such a simple task, and that if I carried on like this I would have no income all summer and only myself to blame.
I opened the file—
—and there was a knock at the door.
The department wants me to create a website for... well, they don't quite know yet. They think it should be for graduate students. In the department. For them to share their research. But maybe also for other students from other departments so that we can lure them in with the awesomeness of linguistics and then poach them. And maybe it should appeal to international prospective students as well. Because they pay fees. So it will need information about studying here. Or maybe it should be secret and password protected so that people will feel comfortable sharing work in progress.
Hey, we know! Why don't you just create the website and THEN we'll decide what it's for?
I can see this job stretching over many, many meetings...
Which could be really rather lucrative.
Friday, November 16, 2007
There goes the rosella training schedule
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6 Comments:
And um... website design is exactly the employment oppertunities that spring to mind when one has a PhD in Linguistics... funky though
The problem is, there isn't much one DOES think of as an employment opportunity for someone with a PhD in Linguistics. Obviously, an academic position, but these are few and far between. And meanwhile, the bank account gets emptier.
Ideally, since a full-time academic position is not at all realistic right now, I plan to scrape together enough part-time jobs doing things I enjoy (like website design, writing, etc) to pay the bills and leave me enough time to let me "keep my hand in" at academic work in the meantime (tutoring, the odd lecture, publishing some papers that come out of my thesis, etc).
Styley, that's awesome!
By the way, if you want to train the rosellas, you could try training them to speak like the African Grey parrot who was in the NYT:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/11/science/11parrot.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
You'd need Geekman to compete with them for food rewards. I don't see that being a problem. ;-)
And if you succeeded there might even be a linguistics paper in it. (rosella syntax or something)
Good for you! Bad for the rosella. But congratulations anyway! :)
Hoping many, many lucrative meetings are in sight. :o)
Congratulations!
With your linguistic skills I'm sure you could persuade them you need an office. And a secretary. (Me. I'm at the cynical end of semester and need a job change.) And a budget.
And if you keep that sort of thing up for long enough you'll have the job forever, because you'll look so established and necessary.
Talk to me! (You know you want to!)