I'm Employeed!

Just got the news this morning: the RoadSoft contract for 2005 was approved by the 'ad board' -- the final hoop to jump through in getting our 2005 contract approved.

Translation: I'm employeed for the year of 2005.

For those of you who don't know, my terms of employement are hard to explain, at best, but I'll try.

I work at/for Michigan Technological University...kinda. My paychecks say "Michigan Tech" on them, but my department has nothing to do with the faculty who teach students. We're kind of like a research department. I work for the Technology Development Group (TDG.) The TDG is a branch of Michigan's Local Technical Assisstance Program (LTAP.)

What's LTAP again?
Every state has an LTAP center. A quote from here puts it like this: "LTAP's mission is to foster a safe, efficient, environmentally sound transportation system by improving the skill and knowledge of local transportation providers through training, technical assistance and technology transfer." See the previous link for more details. Basically, we're a sort of clearing house of information and training for civil engineer types of people. Our LTAP here at Tech is a little different than most LTAP centers in that we have this TDG thing.

So, as you might guess, that makes us a part of the Civil Engineering department here at Tech. But we're a bit different. (Catching the pattern here?) We're like a research group in that we're what you call 'soft money'. The University support us at all. No general fund dollars come our way. If we don't bring in contracts, we go home. We don't work. As far as I've ever known, the contracts we deal with are yearly. So, every year we basically sweat in our boots until we find out if our contracts will be renewed for another year. If not, we sweat a lot more while we scramble to find new jobs.

Buuut anyway... I need to get going.