I gave a talk tonight at another university here, invited by a professor I met last spring at the conference in Georgia. Obviously, it’s Halloween (great planning) so I expected maybe 6 people to turn up. But there was a very nice crowd, the paper went quite well, the audience seemed to really like it and the questions afterwards were also fun. I talked with the department head on the way to dinner afterwards and she seemed to think universities here in the States would be happy to hire me – I certainly didn’t ask or beg, but she volunteered that her department didn’t have a full-time job to offer for the next academic year but that if I was interested, they could definitely “cobble something together” and that we should stay in touch. So I’m kind of amazed and shocked… this is great! I certainly wasn’t expecting job offers based on this one little talk, but I seemed to be in the right place at the right time.

I’m such a durned lucky woman. If I hadn’t sent my paper to the Georgia conference last December way past the cfp deadline and still been accepted; if I hadn’t been placed in the same research group as the VIP professor in the conference, I wouldn’t have been invited to give the talk tonight; and if the department head hadn’t happened to be there… I don’t know if anything will really come from this, but I’ve got renewed confidence in that what I’m doing seems to be something that interests others, too. Happy!