2017 Re-Cap

Following in the footsteps of my year-end summary from last year, here is a list of some of my accomplishments as well as my shortcomings from 2017. Taking time to self reflect on major milestones is important to track where you’ve been as well as where you want to go. As nice as it would be to accomplishment everything that you set out for in a give year, life happens. With that in mind, these sort of lists aren’t necessarily chronicling “successes” and “failures” as they are showing what your real priorities are within the past year and how you can adjust them for the future if you find that your aspirations are out-of-sync with your actualities.

Professional Achievements

• Received our site’s first patent concerning my team’s work on updating our facility’s linear accelerator.
• Submitted a second patent concerning an unrelated efficiency our team implemented on our linear accelerator.
• Presented at the HEART conference this year concerning the capabilities of our radiation test stands.
• Helped spearhead an effort securing a high value, long-term contract (apologies for the vagueness…).
• Became laboratory lead engineer (where else… the linear accelerator group!) and gained more first-time customers than I’ve seen since joining the site.
• Completed all work efforts to the facility’s and customer’s satisfaction — with numerous highly regarded customer reviews.
• Personally recognized at the division level for all of my efforts.
• Submitted application to become a Senior Member of IEEE, having accumulated 10 years of experience and detailing professional growth over the last 5 years

Personal (+ Family!) Achievements

• Ran my first 50 mile race and in a respectable time.
• Saw an exponential growth in my site’s traffic due to the popularity of free number sense practice material for middle and high school students.
• In the last 6 months of 2017, had over 13,000 individual downloads — 1,250 of which was of my Number Sense Manual (which I plan on updating in 2018).
• Successfully flew on a plane with an infant/toddler twice (!!)
• Maintained my “photos of the week” through the first year of my child’s life.
• Supplied some questions for the Utah State Math Contest and became an exam reviewer.
• Continued being valued contributors to our family’s endowment as well as other local charities and causes.

Where I Came Up Short (a lot of areas! — because having a child is tough!)

• Still have not taken the Project Management Professional (PMP) Exam and receive certification which complemented some of my MBA coursework — will DEFINITELY accomplish this year since this has been on the list for two years now.
• Did not become certified National Instruments LabVIEW Developer — however, I don’t think this is a priority anymore, so I’ll scrub it for next year.
• Did not read as many books as I would prefer. (As an aside: highly recommend newly minted Nobel Laureate Richard Thaler’s book Nudge — at least the first half where he explains sources of personal biases). I’m setting a goal of 24 books for 2018.
• Did not actually run a lot of miles last year (282, to be exact). After my 50 mile race, I kind-of slacked for a few months. When I tried to get back into the swing of things, I suffered a pulled groin muscle that sidelined me for most of fall. I’m setting a goal of 1,000 miles in 2018.
• Kind-of sucked with time management in 2017. Yes, having a kid is part of it — and I didn’t fully appreciate that part of it until Eleanor started to crawl — but, overall, I had an incredibly busy work year that bled into my free-time a lot. My goal is letting myself be OK with better allocating work amongst my team as well as to getting myself more on a schedule.

Anyways, here’s to a very action-packed 2017 and the hope that 2018 will be just as fulfilling!