… and counting. At this instant, life is good. In the last year of my existence, I feel that quite a few things have improved. I am closer to graduation than ever. Financial worries exist, but are more manageable. MAD and I are still happy being with each other. Hope this year I will get to live instead of exist.
I passed my general exam last week. It went amazingly well. QoH had my back all the way and put up a good offensive in the closed door sessions. It feels good to have a couple of days where you don’t get up with a to-do list that is long and everything on it is high priority. I am going to take a few days to recharge and then get back to the whole business of graduating. 🙂
QoH took a brief look at the proposal and thinks that I need one more chapter that ties all the work I have done into a cohesive and compelling story. He is right about it, but it so much work. These 15 pages are going to take me a couple of weeks if not more. I hope it is going to be worth it at the end. Right now, I am feeling a bit frustrated by the whole thing.
Most of chapter 1 is done. Trying to figure out what all the work you did over the last 8 years is a lot more difficult than one would assume. The hard part is not assimilating it into a massive document, but to figure out what exactly did you contribute to the advancement of science over the 16 different projects you were involved in, and communicating it succinctly. If any young grad student is reading it, start thinking about this now. If you wait till you actually write your thesis, it will be really really hard.
Feeling pretty happy that I am making some progress towards completion than not.
280 pages of half baked dissertation text beckon, nah… demand, my attention. Most of it is in a semi-decent form, and realistically it needs about 2 weeks of hard work to get into shape. Considering I am just submitting it for a general exam, it is probably a *lot* less work. Not sure why I am having so much inertia when it comes to opening up this file. I need to get this thing done. I am going to target this Friday as a goal to finish the first draft by. I have a good plan of attack.
This video quite succinctly depicts my everyday struggle.
If you thought this blog was dead, you thought wrong. This is a re-birth of sorts.
So, whats been going on in my life in the last year or so:
a) I am close to my general exam, and most of the time these days is spent writing up a dissertation proposal that is closer to final thesis than not.
b) My sis got married and is now just 1800 miles away from me as opposed the 8000+.
c) MAD and I are still together, and I couldn’t be happier about it. My family isn’t happy about me dating outside the culture/religion/race, pretty much every category there is.
I have been wondering about the pros and cons of grad school education in general, and Ph.D. in particular. One thing that most people do not talk about is the opportunity cost of the decision to go to school for 7 more years (2 Masters + 5 Ph.D). Exactly how much does one loose in terms of lost earnings? More importantly, how long does it take for us to make up the difference?
I am suspicious that the numbers don’t play out well for grad school, else they will be touting it around. More on this later.
PS: First post from Google Chrome!
