Thanking your committee etiquette

So, it's been a whirlwind since I've defended, and I realize now that the dust has settled that I ought to thank my committee more than by sending effusive thank you emails and giving effusively grateful thank yous post-defense.

What ought I do? I have bought some thank you cards (nice one, not ones in a pack), and especially nice ones for my chairs. I also purchased bound copies of my thesis for the chairs, though not the rest of the committee. I have received mixed signals about this. Some said I definitely should get some for all, others said that tradition is being phased out. In a survey of my recently graduated peers it was nearly 50/50 in my department.

Either way, I can't decide if very nice thank you cards are enough, or not? Note that I hardly know several of my committee members, and they are spread out over the country so things like restaurant gift certificates are not really feasible.

What did you do for your committee?

I'm a Motherfucking Doctor!!!!

I'm a doctor. It's awesome.

The defense went well, quite well. I'm sooooo excited and happy!!!!!

I'm back blogosphere! Except somewhat regular blogging soon. Lots to say :).

PSA

DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT try to write your thesis while working full time.

DO NOT.

I have the shortest fuse I have ever had in my life. The other day, when going to pick up Mr. Phizz from the airport, I called his airline to see the status of his flight. The stupid voice recognition didn't understand me, even though I was saying simple words like, "Yes." Finally, after a few foiled attempts to get the answers I wanted, I yelled "YES!!!!" so loudly that the sigproc filter on the other end detected that I was deranged and said, "I will transfer you to an agent immediately." I had heard rumors before that all you have to do to talk to a human is shout or curse, but this is the first time little old me ever got to that point.

More recently, I have found myself wanting to cry randomly. Just now, my advisor kindly told me to rest and take a break. I was so touched that I almost started to cry. I am sort of crying now. I am so tired.

I wanted to complain to someone, but Mr. Phizz is asleep and I was pacing around my room, holding back tears and frenetically trying to hold it together.

That's when I decided to blog. Thank you blogosphere, for being the receptable for my venting. I am sorry I haven't paid attention to any of you lately. I hope you understand.

Defense

I have a defense date.

I will not be reading/commenting for a little while as a result.

I am stressed out.

I am excited.

Fin.

Working: Industry or Academia?

I am finally getting used to the cadence of working.

What this means is that when I get ready for bed on the weekdays, I don't think, "What? Time for bed already? And do it all again tomorrow!? Wtf, where did the time go?" I now feel like my evenings are THERE, not just ethereal slots of time that slip away before I realize it.

This also means that on weekends, I do not sleep until 11:30 or 12:30am....I am getting up around 8 or 9. This is good, because my weekends had seemed pretty useless, spent entirely in recovery, kind of like a weekend long post-work hangover. Now, I feel ready to....do stuff on weekends.

Unfortunately, for the time being, the "stuff" I should do is really work on getting my thesis finished. It's really something I've just got to get done, otherwise the time will pass and I'll eventually just give up on it. This is not allowed to happen.

So...how do I feel about work? I work in an industrial lab. This means I have a boss who really directs the overall vision of the research work that we do, which is kind of different from (my) grad school experience, where I had almost complete freedom of direction. However, I know many graduate students who are very micro-managed by their advisors and might feel there is a *decrease* in direction management when taking a job like mine. Especially though my boss directs things from on high, he does not direct from below - at a certain point, I do have almost complete freedom. I'm given a huge sub-branch of the gigantic tree of potential research, and I can do what I want in that sub-branch.

The other thing about working in an industrial lab is this -- let's face it, the economy sucks. Industrial labs of old were basically smart people fucking around the best way smart people know how to and just doing, "what if" type stuff. What was born of that? Um, Unix, awk, sed, C...the TRANSISTOR.....really awesome stuff. But now that the economy sucks, even the amazing industrial labs of old don't really do that anymore. It's much more directed; the hope is eventually what you do will help the company bottom line.

The thing is, I'm kind of fine with that. I personally have never been super comfortable in crazy-out-there research space. If you're making this industrial vs. academic decision, then I'd imagine this is one of the more important factors.

The other thing about working in industry is that I do not have to beg for money. The longer I work, the more I'm pretty excited about that. The more I realize that this is the way to go for me (at least for now). I used to really feel motivated about teaching the next level of students...wanting to do that, but now I just...feel flat in that regard. I am enjoying my job too much to care about that right now.

It all depends on what you care about. Right now, the thought of making up slides for a class, for teaching students, particularly ones who try to grade-monger, the thought of publishing endlessly and writing grants...it makes me tired. It makes me glad I'm not doing that.

There are others, of course, who would chafe under the infrastructure that I am currently under. Their eyes would glaze over when considering the business aspects of their research, the utility for how it would or could actually be deployed, drilling down to the details of making something ACTUALLY happen.

It all really depends on what you would prefer. I'm just laying it out how I see it personally.

I'm happy with my job.

Life Status

I am taking the internship.

I am not defending prior to taking the internship. For reasons I will not discuss openly, I am fairly comfortable with that. Besides, I'm almost done with Chapter 3 and am doing pretty well with Chapter 5, so that's all good. My latest mental deadline is October and I'm sure I can do that, not stress myself out, and get myself PAID this summer way more than with my miserable stipend.

I have not gotten any job offers yet. Another good thing about internships is they are usually extensible, so if I'm still in trouble in the middle of the summer and no one wants to give me a real job, I can just extend the internship. But still, I need to apply to a few more places, I think.

I wish I knew where we were going to live for the next few years. Then we'd totally buy a house. I can't help but feel this is just an awesome time to buy - but we have no idea. So no house buying. But I wish we could.......I find myself wistfully paging through listed homes on zillow.com, all in various cities where we might end up but really have no idea....

I am planning to bike commute all summer on a cyclocross bike. I'm allz excited about that. Wooooooo! Any excuse to buy a new bike is a good excuse to me.

So yeah

No one I know says I should defend before going on this internship. These are all people who are on my side too, people who look out for me. So....yeah. Since several of these people are also on my committee, it looks like....I'm not defending soon. This year, yes. But soon....no.

I'm an Idiot

I use *nix as an OS.

In *nix, there is a utility called wc (word count).

It provides number of lines, words, and characters in a given document or set of documents.

I looked at the wrong column for my thesis. I do not have 42K words. I have 6370.

Oops. I suppose that makes a lot more sense. Now I question my own sniff test skills - DUH. What was I thinking?

This Lovely Saturday Night

I'm having wine. And watching my favorite team play.

And I finished my first draft of chapter 2.

Fuck yeah. I'm at forty-fuckin-two thousand words baby.

Lots of good shit

This will be a brief update of everything that is going on, mostly good, until I have time to put up a post with a few choice pictures from my trip.

1. FIL is home!!! He went home the day we left for our trip, and he's doing ok. He's not nearly 100% but seems to be on the up and up, and I hope within a month or two he'll really be back to his old form. I know he hates being like this, so I feel bad, but it's as long as he's on an upward trajectory, however shallow, we are all glad.
2. Trip was AWESOME!
3. While I was away, I got MORE job nibbles! One is kind of weird though - they really REALLY want me but can only offer an internship right now, and say they hope it can become a full-time later. This is a tough one. It's right up my alley, plus, it's great to be wanted, but it's a bit scary without knowing about the full-time. Another was for a postdoc possibility from a mentor. But as I've mentioned in previous posts, I'm not sure I want academia anymore. So I don't think I'll pursue that, as amazing as it would be if I wanted to be at an R1. So, still nothing totally straightforward about what I should do with myself, but prospects seem better than before.
4. March Madness has begun. And I freakin LOVE March Madness. Like, seriously, love that shit.
5. I had a kind of productive day and have written a non-trivial number of words.

Woooot!!!!

Today

Today I'm going to get so much shit done the world isn't going to know what hit it and spin around 2x in 24 hours.

That's right, suck it world! Phizzle is going to kick some serious ass today.

That is all.

Thesis Audience

So today I spoke with my advisors about what audience I should aim my thesis introduction towards. One advisor said that his advisor said your thesis introduction should be something you can give your (non-technical) mom and dad and they should be able to get through.

This is a pretty tall order, but one to which I will try to adhere. It makes sense - a thesis is not necessarily geared at a particular audience the way a conference or journal paper is, and thus greater introductory background is necessary. I actually would be quite amused to see what my mother would make of my thesis introduction, "That's nice, dear, it looks very nice." Haha. My mother is adorable and sweet and wonderful.

I just wanted to share this tidbit of information which is going to be helpful to me. Now I can continue writing!

Writing...dun dun dun....the THESIS

Yesterday, I kinda sorta started thinking about writing my thesis. Mentally I did all the things people on TV do when they are going to start writing something. I cleared off the desk, I opened the spec sheet, I made sure I was ready. Kinda like this:



I have a thesis proposal, largely formatted according to specification, which is about two years old. First, I started to try to write the abstract. But then Mr. PhizzleDizzle advised me to write the abstract last. He says he always writes the abstract last because well, I guess it makes sense to write the "summary" when you've finished the work.

So then I move on to revamping the introduction, and find that I am totally stuck. I mean, this is the THESIS, not just some paper. I felt all compelled to make sure each sentence, nay, each WORD was perfectly selected to perfectly convey what I was thinking. Not only that, I began to wonder about general content.

Like I said, this proposal that I'm retooling is a few years old. Things that were true when I wrote it are no longer true, in the sense that I started out with, "X is becoming more and more Y", while nowadays it's more like, "X has become Y." So when I wrote the proposal, a large part of my introduction went far into background, explaining the phenomena of the trend of X towards Y, going into detail because not everyone in the field might have known or cared at that point.

But now, the fact that X is Y is basically a given, so I am not sure whether, because this is the THESIS,I should still provide the background information to lay the groundwork for my research, or be like, well, everyone knows this by now so let's just get on with it.

If any experienced thesis writers could provide insight as to how much background to go into during introduction, I would be appreciative. And of course, I will also be asking my advisor, who is actually a reasonably good advisor. Most of the time.