This year and next

I just offered my resignation at Villa Zee Zicht. I will not be going into the new year with them. This is not through any fault of theirs, of course, but because I was offered a position today for two days a week at the university. Yes, I will not just be a student, but also an employee of the university.

It won’t be fun to leave the cafe behind. I’ve spent pretty much the whole of my first half year in the Netherlands there. During the summer I was working there regularly 50 hours a week, which might not sound like much for those of you in other industries but it’s a crazy amount to be working in F&B. Lately, of course, the amount of work I’ve been doing there has dropped steadily; from five days to three and then from three to two. Now, of course, it will go down to zero. One more month of café work.

So what will I be doing at the university? Well, one of my days will be dedicated to helping a team of researchers develop applications for emotion recognition software. Software has already partially been developed to allow a computer to use a webcam to identify the emotional state of a user. Now two PhD students will be exploring the application of this further and they apparently need a social psychologist. So what that means for me is that I’ll be spending a whole lot of time investigating emotions, especially as displayed on the face (there’s a whole group of researchers in Social Psychology busy with exactly that).

The other day I’ll be working as a managerial assistant. In that task my experience as a writer will again become important, as I’ll be assisting the head of the social science department specifically in the task of editing, reviewing, writing and summarizing. She just doesn’t have the time to do all the work that’s in her lap, so hey, presto! There’s me.

One of the coolest things I will get to do is write a chapter for a book about emotions in the media. Of course afterwards she’ll have to proof read it, edit it and eventually put her name on it (I’m writing it in her name), but hey, it’s a little more prestigious than making people coffee! (in that case I’m talking about making people black coffee, cappuccinos are another matter entirely.)

But first there is this month to survive. I’ve got an exam on the ninth (for which I will have to re-read approximately 15 articles), I’ve got a research article due on the 12th (for which I will need to read approximately 15 articles and which is between 2.5k and 3k words) and on the 17th I’ve got a research proposal due (for which I will have to read another 15 articles and which is between 2k and 4k words). That means I’ll be reading about three articles a day and writing a grand total of somewhere between 4.5k and 7k words.

I hadn’t looked at it that way yet. Uh, I’ll talk to you later.