Looking ahead
Everybody asks me "what are you doing next?". Here's my plans:
- Next few days: do nothing.
- Sep 08 - Dec 08: don't get a day job. Take contract work (either programming or, much more likely, music) if it makes itself available.
- Jan 09 - June 09: research assistant at the National University of Singapore.
- July 09 - Aug 09: no plans, but still no day job. Contract work or prep for PhD.
- Sep 09 onwards: PhD candidate.
Location for the PhD? I'm trying to arrange it at a university in Scotland. Not for the country; there's a specific person I want to do the PhD with. Funding is a big issue, though -- tuition would be 12,350 pounds per year, and the cost of living in the UK is pretty high. I'm quite optimistic, though; there's a year to work things out, and the professor was quite keen to get me there.
If that doesn't work out, then I'd remain in Canada. Two of the Canadian universities I was thinking about attending have close ties to the Scottish university, so if I went to them, it would be very easy to be a foreign exchange student (paying domestic student rates) for a year.
Open-source work: I have about 5 hours of work left to do for LilyPond and Marsyas. Then I'm going to do about 20-30 hours on Strasheela. And I'll be making MEAWS (my thesis project; Musician Evaluation and AWdition for Strings) publicly available after fixing a few major embarassments.
At that point I'll be looking for new projects in need of limited-time help. NUS has a very strict copyright policy, so I'm not going to be working on any open-source projects while I'm there. So I have Oct - Dec free to spend on such projects. I'll take a serious look at FreeBSD, since my brother is so involved in it. Other than that... who knows?
For fun: I have a year's worth of fantasy books to get from the library -- I haven't had access to a public library for the past year, so I'm sure that all my favorite authors have published new books.
I also have 6 anime boxed sets to watch, with 4 more coming in the mail. I usually buy them online and have them shipped to my parent's house (since that's the address on my credit card). I occasionally take one back to Victoria when I visit my parents, but I generally just let them pile up while I was finishing the Masters.
I also need to clean up my room (it's the family storage room, so a lot of junk has piled up in the past two years), start a string quartet, join an orchestra or two, start seriously practicing violin... I'll have plenty of things to keep me occupied.