Nonstationarity

I have not written here in a couple of months now, and certainly I have not done more than some reblogging.  I think I fell off the tumblr track.

In any case, I’ve been in Philadelphia since the beginning of October. At some point I will write more about how I feel about Philly, but for now I think it’s safe to say that I generally like it here. It’s different than Chicago, different than Pittsburgh. Even though I’m kind of lonely and somewhat disconnected from the social threads here, there is still a good deal to enjoy.

For a while, I was working for a local food distribution company. I was an Excel geek, and spent my days dealing with spreadsheets and ERP systems and all that. The work was interesting, but things did not work out as planned, and I left not long after.

Now, I am working as a research associate at Solutions for Progress, a company at the intersection between IT and public policy. It’s a great place, I’m doing interesting work, an it allows me to explore my economics and IT background. The position gives me a space to think about things, to see how novel ideas can be implemented to help people out of poverty. I will probably begin writing about the things I am learning in some way, possibly as tumblr posts.

I do have a few ideas for posts, including some book reviews, so there will be more writing on here in the future. For now, though, I wanted to just update.

Changing jobs is a difficult process, even in the best of economic times.  This goes double when my career is changing as well.  Most of my professional life, my work has been in system administration and network analysis. (There were a few jobs as business analyst, research assistant, and so forth, but they take up a small part of my job history.) While I still have the basic skills, I haven’t kept up with the technology since moving over to economics. Also, I went back to school in part because I didn’t have any real interest in continuing to be an IT admin.  So, a lot of my switch currently involves changing my résumés so that I accentuate my research/math/programming skills.  (Functional résumés are good in that respect.)

What makes the job search more difficult is that my wife and I are changing location as well.  At the end of September, we’re moving to Philadelphia.  That’s right.  After two years in Chicago, we’re getting rid of most of our stuff, packing that which we want to save, and driving out to Philadelphia.

This will be the third time I’ve moved to another city.  (The second time may not count, really — it was returning to Chicago, after eighteen years here and another eleven in Pittsburgh.)  The first time, it was to college, and so I was expecting to meet people there.  The second time, it was back here, and I was already familiar with the lay of the land, had some friends here, and didn’t feel totally alien.  So, this will be the first time I will have moved to a place where I don’t know all that many people, and don’t have either an existing social network or something conducive to creating social networks (i.e. college). This idea of going to a new place and having to start over from scratch scares me somewhat, since I have not done it before.

Yet I am looking forward to it.  I didn’t get the reset button when we moved back to Chicago; this time, there’s a chance to begin anew, to try new things, to develop social connections largely unencumbered from what I was familiar with.  Doing that here required a lot of energy to overcome inertia, and with school and family illness concerns, I didn’t have that sort of energy.  But with those things handled (to varying degrees, of course), I can try something new.

I plan to use this blog to chronicle the last weeks in Chicago — the good, the bad, the frustrating, the new, the old — and the move over to Philadelphia, with all that such a process entails.