10 Year

I’ve been working on this post for, well, ten years.

But seriously, time is a funny thing, and it gets funnier the older you get. I remember when we first moved to Florida in 2015, I was thinking it’ll be 2025 and I will have worked at UNF for a decade. I was at the University of Mary Washington for 17 years (I started there when it was Mary Washington College). Obviously, working for only two universities in 27 years makes me a pretty loyal employee. However, I won’t say that over that time I wasn’t tempted by the fruit of another school (or schools?).

So here I am, a ten-year employee at UNF. My first day of work I guess depends on whether an all-day orientation session counts as work. To my way of thinking, Tuesday, September 15, 2015 was the day I started work, but officially it was the 14th.

Funny story (or not) – when I was a kid, though my dad wasn’t officially an “academic”, he had colleagues who taught at universities. I first heard the word “tenure” associated with professors. I thought the word was “ten-year”, and that it simply meant if you worked as a professor for ten years you could then stay in your job forever. So I guess now I officially have tenure at UNF, minus the forever part.

Working at a public university has been my career. I started at the State University of New York at Cortland in 1992, and then worked at SUNY Oneonta in 1996. There was one year that I worked for a private company that wrote municipal tax software, but I quickly learned that a public institution was where I belonged.

I always give credit to Jim Groom for helping me find UNF. In 2013 he was a keynote speaker at UNF’s Instruction and Research Technology conference. He said that CIRT reminded him of DTLT. He was right, and UNF has given me the opportunity to extend and expand my set of skills to a level I was only dreaming of 10 years ago.

I have so much to reflect upon over my time at UNF, and I’ll continue to write those reflections here on the blog. However, I have hit my 61st birthday, and thoughts of the “R” word are beginning to creep into the conversation as 2026 marks the year I turn 62. I was thinking about that in 2015 as well. Lots of things need to happen between now and then to make retirement a reality. I’ll put it at a 20% chance that next year will be the start of my golden ones.

For right now, I have more than enough ideas to carry on for several more years serving the university, and the community of Jacksonville. It’s just that right now I’m feeling the great impact of tenure, er, I mean ten years.

Thank you, UNF!

Photo by Immo Wegmann on Unsplash