I handed in my dissertation two weeks ago. There’s a few things to finish up but the major things I’ve wanted to deliver this year - a cryptanalysis report, an evolutionary computing experiment, my video processing dissertation - are all done. So from my perspective I’m pretty much done and awaiting Graduation come July!

The Masters year was exhausting and I’m a little burned out, so I’m hoping not to rush into anything. I’ve wanted to go travelling in Europe for a few years now but kept finding interesting internships instead. Now between University and what-comes-after I have a natural gap.

Friends, culture and history put Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin and Greece on the list. I’d like to follow Archaeological data I worked with into the Troodos Mountains in Cyprus, but that would be a trip in itself.

“And the danger is that in this move toward new horizons and far directions, that I may lose what I have now, and not find anything except loneliness.”

—Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

That quote above is one a friend sent me. They’re moving back to east Asia, away from the friends they’ve made here in York and back to a different culture. I sympathise in my own way: I grew up in an isolated village and adopted York as my hometown.

Over these six years London, Hamburg, the San Francisco Bay Area, Cambridge, MA and a few other cities in the U.S. have gained wonderful memories as well. This shows I don’t have to worry, and yet the Plath quote remains.

I’ve chatted with a lot of people about what to do next. It needs to be a step up, and yet it’s hard to know what a step up from effective-CTO of a technically hard startup would be. Delivering in a larger organisation? “Cross-functional agile teams?” Engineering technically-harder things? Making better startup decisions the second time around?

I’m gonna find out.