As I planned to write this, I realized I had the same idea, for the same reason, last year in September! Suddenly, there are conferences to attend, freelance work picks up, and a new year begins for my volunteer commitments.
So in no particular order, this is what’s going on:
- After seeing the call for proposals and chatting with my husband on ideas to submit, we both decided to submit proposals to the 2018 Interchange conference, put together by the New England Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication (STC). So now we will be attending the Interchange conference, and in keeping with the theme of the conference, I will be talking about Engineering Your Networking Experiences.
- Upon seeing a vacancy for a Marketing and Promotions volunteer position in the newsletter for the Board of Editors in the Life Sciences (BELS), I got in touch with the president, who I served with on the Board for the American Medical Writers Association (AMWA), and asked whether they still needed someone and what was involved. So I am now getting to know the leadership in the organization and seeing what I can get done for them.
- Being involved with BELS means I need to attend their Executive Committee meeting right after the AMWA conference, so now I am going to try to catch some of the AMWA Medical Writing & Communication Conference. Looking forward to re-connecting with my AMWA friends.
- One of my freelance clients is picking up again, just finishing up one phase of the project and getting ready to start another. We’ll probably finish the project by the end of the year, so it will be bittersweet as we’ve been working on the dossier on and off for over a year!
- I began another year as President for the Rochester chapter of STC with a planning retreat, and I’m excited to be able to attend more events that are closer to home with the CNY Chapter of STC.
- Lastly, but more immediately, I will be conducting a webinar on September 19 (2-3 pm ET) for STC on Ideas and Advice for Building Side Gigs at Your Day Job. This is a topic I covered in the Interchange 2017 conference in-person, so I am making some adjustments to the slides and the flow of the conference to make it work for a webinar.
Overall, I’m really excited with everything that’s going on and looking forward to Fall! And for another flashback, here’s the pic I posted last year.