30 Days of Geek: 03 – What does your day job involve?
I have three things that I usually do with my day-to-day life:
First up, I’m an eternal student (or at least, I usually am). Unusually, this semester’s been spent not studying anything for the first time in most of my life; though I intend to take up a Ph.D. candidature from next year. I’ll probably be studying in the field of machine learning, since that’s what my Honours thesis focused on, and I seem to enjoy it somewhat.
Other than that, I’m an itinerant tutor at the University of Tasmania. I taught computer graphics programming (OpenGL et all) this semester, and machine learning the semester before that. I love having the opportunity to help people learn how to do things, and it’s great fun trying to convey some of my own knowledge to people who want to receive it. On the other hand, I hate having to deal with people who either don’t have the skill set to be taking the units which I teach, or people who don’t want to learn — marking assignments from people who don’t have a clue, or otherwise don’t care is a nightmare.
I also accept short-term contract coding whenever I can be bothered. The most unusual thing I’ve done in that respect is implementing a piece of installation art for a roller derby match. That was bizarre 🙂
This invariably changes, depending on what work I can be bothered doing at the time, so what I’ve said now probably won’t be the case in six months time.