A Matter of Timing

May 17, 2008

11:18 AM

Oh sleep, how I covet thee. I've known from the second week in this quarter that my schedule would quite simply not work. I live 90 minutes from campus. I know, I'm crazy. But I refuse to live in dorms or college apartments. (I was an undergrad once, I did my time!). It's not that I'm in love with my current apartment, just the east bay. Easy shopping, easy access to the city, low crime rate. Any location close to a college town has tenants who view their apartment as extremely temporary, or land lords who view their tenants as extremely temporary. Their care level for being a good neighbor or good tenet goes way down.

So to reduce driving time, I started taking the van pool this quarter. It's much better for the environment and I'm estimating a savings of about $200 a month! On the downside, it's lengthened my commute time to about 2 hours and reduces the flexibility I have schedule wise. These days I wake up by 5am, so I can be out my front door by 6, on campus by 8. At 5 I start the trek home, arriving at my doorstep at 7pm. Getting eight hours of sleep would require being in bed by 9, so instead I'm averaging about five hours of sleep. Those three hours make a difference. Yesterday I flew home for Ling's wedding. I slept 5 of the 6 hours during the flight, then went to bed for another eight hours. It felt good.

Then there's the job market. In my area (personalized search) it's doing extremely well. All the big-dog search engine companies are proclaiming the future will be in personalized search. You can't attend a conference these days, or read a newspaper clipping that doesn't talk about it. It reminds me of the dot com boom in the nineties, only much more targeted. I've been contacted by half a dozen (no joke, I'm not exaggerating) separate recruiters and a number of head hunting firms looking to fill "chief scientist" roles. This is exactly the direction I want to take my career in! Alas, I have to turn it down. Working full time and doing grad school is not an option. Not if I want to be successful at both. So I have to wait and hope this Boom happens again in five years. Realistically, I hope to be have made a good name for myself so it doesn't matter if the field is booming, it just matters that it's still kicking.

The past four years I've been diligently saving my pennies for a down payment on a house. When I decided to go to grad school two years ago, it looked like a house was a distant dream. Now that I could actually get into the market, and have a fair chunk of a down payment, I'm no longer earning a full time professional salary. I'm also whittling away at my savings while in grad school. My current projections put me anywhere between two thirds and about half of my savings left at the end of five years. So I could be lucky and survive with much of my down payment unscathed, but I like to be prepared for the worst case.

Market patterns are cyclic. The search engines will go through boom and bust periods, the housing market will recover, and lull again. Still, I can't help but notice that my timing sucks.