Long time coming

Hi everyone,

Well, This year started off with some major insanity which has delayed our normal semi-often updates on what is up with the Hendrickson Clan (the CO branch anyway). After Batman came into our lives last year the crazy ball just kept getting bigger and bigger, and to be honest, it isn't getting much smaller. I write this after working all day and night last night to finish a HW assignment and write up a mid-term. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Christmas vacation was a much needed break that ended too shortly and was not as recharging as we'd hoped (especially as our energy is seriously lagging and we're only at mid-terms).

We spent Christmas with my family in Arizona which was more stressful on us and our kids than we'd expected. My parents are about a 14~15 hour drive away and with an almost new-born and toddler that proved to be an extreme challenge. We did the leg there all in one night. There was a huge storm blowing in and I wanted to get out of it and not be stuck. It was a good thing we did but it was really hard on all of us as the boys were not used to sleeping that long in the car. Christmas at my parents was challenging because Superman was not dealing with a new environment + a new brother that well (naps were totally a horrible to implement issue, Superman learned out to climb out of his crib). Other than that it was great to see all my brothers together for the first time in a few years (number 4, Kevan, got back from his Mission recently).




On the way home we decided to stop and stay at a hotel, which worked out pretty well, mom and dad got a few hours of sleep, as did the boys, and we started the next day a little refreshed. The drive still took forever but we got home in one piece.

After we got home there were some really tough discussions Megan and I had to have as a couple over my PhD applications. Most were due on January 15th and I was in crunch mode to get them in. I'd lined up all my letters, and begun writing my letters of intent. It was really hard. It was hard for two reasons. While at my parents I'd been offered a full time position (was still in salary negotiations at the time) with a company called Webfilings.com. The position would be as a Software Engineer working on their client side application as well as some Text Mining work (so leveraging my computational linguistics background, a big+).  So, I had a job offer, and they were willing to wait till June for me to start work, that was the first hard part. The second hard part was trying to wrap my head around not doing a PhD.

Those of you who know me, know I'm pretty intense and very driven to succeed. I've also been working really hard and sacrificed a lot (including another great software engineering job) to get here and into the program I'm in. I'm pretty sure if I'd applied here I would have gotten full funding and could have continued in my studies in Linguistics and Computational Semantics. I really should say "we've" sacrificed as my dear Megan has stood by me through these choices and accepted the less than stellar lifestyle/living conditions while I've worn myself to the bone juggling courses, work, family, and research.

Sitting back and saying, nope, I'm going to not continue was really hard, but one of the people who interviewed me asked a great question. He said "So, it looks like everything you've worked on in the past has had something to do with language" and then asked "Would you be happy if you were working on problems that were not language specific?" It was a poignant moment for me as it forced me to crystallize, quickly, my feelings (I was very honest with these guys, all 9 of them). I realized, and what I told him, was that I loved to solve problems with technology. Wife is pregnant, I want to get a robot vacuum cleaner and build a bluetooth interface so she doesn't have to lean over and push the button. Friend is tired of copy pasting numbers? I want to write a little AI program to help him in his job.

Later, at home, writing I sat down and looked at the courses I'd taken in the Linguistics department here and looking at my charted future courses I realized something important. I loved the research I'm doing, and would continue doing (working on never ending learning systems for verb sense disambiguation) but I just couldn't honestly say I was enthused in any way about taking more courses in Phonetics, Syntax, or a number of other required courses. I realized that if I was ever going to do a PhD it needed to be a very tailored program around machine learning, computer science, and computational linguistics with the end goal of being in a CS department or working for a large Natural Language Processing company. I also had to honestly say I am not tooled for those programs right now.

Another big factor in this decision was looking at how my life had been for the past year and a half and honestly evaluate how wearing my lifestyle had been. Megan and I also discussed this at length and all my reasons combined with a few of hers (mainly focused on her concern for me) and we made the decision that I should pursue full time employment instead of staying at the University.

It took Webfilings a little longer to get a firm offer to me (almost till February) so we had to make this call without a firm exit plan in place, which was terrifying. That said, as this semester has worn on I really think we made the right choice.

In order to finish I'm going full throttle and we'll see if I can make it. I have to cram in 10 graduate credits this semester plus I've put off my defense till later this summer once Martha Palmer gets back from  her sabbatical. We decided to not have me work (other than research, which I really need to get on) so things are tight, but we'll make it through till we have a much more solid income coming in from my new position.

Phew if you read this long, congrats, see what happens when I don't write more often!

Best,

Ross