Two weeks ago I finished classes at Strath, and last week I finished my last pre-dissertation course assignments. I then granted myself a lovely staycation, reading good books and sunbathing in the radiant sunshine here on the Costa del Clyde (do not adjust your sets, this really happened.)
Having cleared my mind, my cheerful feelings of post-postgraduate accomplishment were quickly overcome with nagging thoughts for my future, and those thoughts go a little something like this:
Bloody hell, I am bored.
Seriously.
I need a new challenge.
There’s far too much happening in the world – in my areas of work, forchristssake – for me to be dozing off on my sun lounger. And freelancing isn’t fulfilling to me anymore, either professionally or financially. (Never has been, but needs must.)
I want to be someplace I can get back into fighting good fights – and getting my hands dirty.
Someplace a bit like Open Rights Group, but where the board and management don’t openly hate the staff.
(Related: someplace that respects its staff by providing career progression and dignified salaries, not insults them with 12 month contracts on £28k pa gross/£21k net.)
Someplace that sees my age and experience as a plus and not a minus.
Someplace that sees the global implications of these rapidly unfolding wicked domestic policy problems – on all sides of the Atlantic – like I do. People, you should see my dissertation mindmap.
Someplace that doesn’t sneer at me because I don’t have a Ph.D.
Someplace that doesn’t discard my CV on the first sift because I am (choke!) not in London.
(Related: someplace that understands the concepts of “trains”, which are these long metal things on rails that go straight from Glasgow to London eight times per day. And then they go back again! It’s quite the sorcery.)
Someplace that hasn’t been completely captured by cognitively detached academics who think that we can fix the wicked problems at the intersection of law, technology, and politics by writing academic papers and sticking them behind academic paywalls.
Someplace that wants someone who knows how to cause good trouble.
I fight good fights. That’s what I do.
Someone give me one.
