All 1 entries tagged Resolutions

New Year's Resolutions

I don’t usually make New Year’s resolutions – but I thought this year would be a good time to start. It’s also about time for another blog post. (Side note: this blog will very soon be three years old, so happy birthday.) I think in order to check what you’ve actually achieved you really do need to write down your resolutions. By doing it in public – it gives you more incentive to succeed.

1. Finish PhD

Very few people actually finish their PhD within the three years that they, presumably, set out to. Gordon Brown, for example, took 10 years. At the beginning of October 2009 the first three years of my PhD will be up. I’m going to aim to finish writing up by then. This will require the level of productivity that I achieved in my 4th undergraduate year, but frankly, haven’t gotten back up to since.

2. Get a Job

This obviously depends on (1) – but more importantly it depends on me figuring out precisely what I want to do with myself. Its quite tempting to try and continue an academic career, but it’ll be hard to obtain an interesting position given the poor student numbers. I’d also like a job with more hard deadlines again for a bit. Industrial research seems vaguely interesting – usually good application and plenty of good people doing work there, but in the current economic climate I’m sure research will be cut back on. Certainly this will suck up much of my musing time in 2009.

3. Complete Uncompleted projects

I currently have a whole load of partially finished personal coding projects lying around between my desktop and my laptop. I need to pick two or three of these and actually sit down and finish them off.

Good luck in 2009 readers.

: 01 Jan 2009 03:58 |  Tags: Reflections Resolutions |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem