RE: *OT* My day job
Truff,
The Hudson Mohawk Industrial Gateway. (It's not my
choice of name. I inherited it. I'd have called it
something like "Industrial Heritage Institute of
the Hudson Mohawk Region," or maybe a sexier version
of same, anything that won't automatically get the
response I get now when I tell people the name,
which of course is: "That's nice. What does it do?")
To make a long story short, I'm a PhD American
historian who specializes in the history of American
technology and science, and I bailed from a tenured
academic post at the end of 1996. Too many hours
wasting my talents correcting sophomore grammar.
My pitch is that the area here near Albany and Troy,
New York, was the "Silicon Valley of the nineteenth
century," that the area can put that past to good
use, and that study of the history of this area
can be useful in current policy debates about how
best to use a cutting-edge technological focus for
regional economic development. If your eyes
haven't totally glazed over yet, you can check
the very rudimentary web site I've created for
the organization:
rpi.edu
The organization sank itself into something of a
penniless, moribund hole in the past few years,
so I'm struggling to bring it back. So far this
year, I've managed to triple the revenues over
the 1996 total, but that gets the sum to a level
that's smaller than some of your losses during
the little correction a while back. The long-term
goal is to make it the best regional industrial
heritage program in the country, full stop. That'll
take another few months. <g>
Thanks for asking. After all that "good-looking
corpse" stuff, I hesitate to ask what YOUR day
job is. <vbg>
Cheers, Tom |
