wow, it’s been a while since i’ve last updated!

fourth of july was fun, did the usual going downtown annapolis to see fireworks from the naval academy grounds (which, actually, i hadn’t done in a while since the rest of the family were away on vacation somewhere at this time the last few years). aunt carol and my cousins from florida came up to visit with their relatives up around here and stayed with us for a few days over the holiday. stueypark and i went to the orioles game last friday, which was fun too.

before i left for my trip to europe (this was on june 11), the manager of the systems team i applied to called me in for a meeting to say that it’d take a while to get things straightened out (she had to tell the other applicants that they didn’t get the job, had to get some details worked out with HR, etc.), but she wanted to tell me that i had a “soft offer” for the position and once all the details were worked out then we could make it official with actual salary information and a start date and such. well, i didn’t really hear any more details from her until friday of last week when she gave me official notice that i got the position and gave me salary information and such.

honestly i’m a bit disappointed about the salary; when i moved from the internet response team to executive relations a year ago, i figured that would be a modest increase in pay even though both positions were in the same salary band and had the same job title, but executive relations was a bit more higher profile than internet response team. i swear my supervisor told me then that it was a 6% increase in salary, but doing the math now i see that it was a 7%. still, yaaaay. fast forward to this promotion; i did some research on websites like glassdoor.com to see what typical pay is like, and it seemed like it’d be about a $10k increase at least. unfortunately, even though it’s still in the same pay band, and though it’s a more demanding job title (in the corporate tree scheme of things, analyst > coordinator), and though i now have my degree which i didn’t have when i moved from internet response team to executive relations, it’s still only a 6% pay increase… which works out to be about $200 less than the raise i got when i moved from internet response team to executive relations. sigh.

so when the manager gave me the salary information before our meeting on friday afternoon, i brought up my concerns and she said that she had the same concerns too about the salary. see, we were actually going to meet up earlier in the week to go over the salary and job info, but she postponed it because she wanted some clarification from HR about their calculations. it turns out that the salary information that HR originally gave her was less than what they finally approved her to offer to me — when she originally saw what they were going to pay me she basically told HR that the amount they gave was insulting and told them to raise it up. (also, apparently an “analyst” gets paid differently depending on the branch of the business — an analyst in the finance team, my position, gets paid less than an analyst in the information technology team, the guys who actually design and build the software we use.)

but this is one of those positions that you take for your own strategic, personal career reasons. sure the pay isn’t what i was expecting, but at least it should be an extra $100 or so per paycheck. this also gets my face in front of the IT teams elsewhere in the company. unfortunately, if i want to move on to the actual IT departments, that’d mean moving to some place like new jersey, california or georgia, which i’m not that keen on doing at this time. i’d rather stay around the DC area if possible, but if the job was right then who knows.

i guess it just frustrated me that while my skills and knowledge have increased, the pay isn’t that encouraging, especially when we’re supposed to be doing very well and the company barely wants to give me an increase, and when DC-area tech firms are hiring like crazy too.

i don’t start in this new position until august 16. so, that’s about four-and-a-half months since i originally applied for this job. sheesh!

my current supervisor has pretty much told us that by this time next year she doesn’t want any of us on her team since she wants us to move elsewhere and upward within the company (this was while i was waiting a concrete offer), so she’s been encouraging my team to take advantage of our tuition reimbursement program. tomorrow they’re having representatives from a bunch of local and online universities come to the office so we can talk to them about their offerings. i’ve already filled out the application for the online master’s in information technology track at UMBC and looked into the program, but i’m going to talk about it before i actually pay the registration fee and apply. the only concern i have is my GPA from UMBC before i transferred to UMUC: it’s not high enough to qualify, but my GPA from UMUC is. i wonder if i’m supposed to include my UMBC GPA in the application even though i didn’t graduate from there or what exactly i’m supposed to do. sigh. at least if i can’t apply to the master’s program, then i’ll probably apply for six sigma certification through villanova online, so there’s always that to help make me more valuable.

and i still need to finish updating the pictures from europe with captions and tags and titles! 🙁 haha