Yup yup still here
Haven't posted in weeks, but am safely in Charlottesville. Everything and everyone made it here in mostly one piece (except the Audi didn't fare well with it's alternator dying, needing a new battery and tire issues that makes me wish someone would just get rid of that POS and buy a quality Japanese car but whatever).
I'm slowly learning my way around town though I am slightly annoyed that it's 8.5 miles to Target. That's the furthest I've ever lived from a Target since 1998. On the upside the pick your own peach and apple orchard is about 3.5 miles away and I've already gone picking apples which I need to turn into something like apple crisp soon.
Other than that I wrote a white paper in 4 days for the decadal survey based on what we did during summer school. Of course with everyone trying to edit our paper, we decided the mention of the summer school sounded too much like "what I did on my summer vacation" and we chopped most of the mention of that out after the abstract. We'll see if people laugh at the uppity grad students trying to pitch a mission.
And. . .still working on thesis. Am going to Puerto Rico in early October to present some of the results. Just got my "review" from the people in the frozen tundra about my progress and it simply says:
"Congratulations on your rapid progress. Based on your annual report we look forward to seeing your completed Ph.D thesis soon."
We'll note- no mention of winning an award from our professional organization. Whatevs. Just need to write the papers, keep the advisor happy, get a postdoc and get out. And perhaps after the epic scrum of writing the white paper I will have started to get over my panic about how all my writing is crap and be able to sit down and just slam this damned thing out. I've set a hard deadline of 40 weeks from this Friday for my defense as that would be my birthday and becoming a doctor on one's birthday wouldn't be the worst thing ever.
I'm slowly learning my way around town though I am slightly annoyed that it's 8.5 miles to Target. That's the furthest I've ever lived from a Target since 1998. On the upside the pick your own peach and apple orchard is about 3.5 miles away and I've already gone picking apples which I need to turn into something like apple crisp soon.
Other than that I wrote a white paper in 4 days for the decadal survey based on what we did during summer school. Of course with everyone trying to edit our paper, we decided the mention of the summer school sounded too much like "what I did on my summer vacation" and we chopped most of the mention of that out after the abstract. We'll see if people laugh at the uppity grad students trying to pitch a mission.
And. . .still working on thesis. Am going to Puerto Rico in early October to present some of the results. Just got my "review" from the people in the frozen tundra about my progress and it simply says:
"Congratulations on your rapid progress. Based on your annual report we look forward to seeing your completed Ph.D thesis soon."
We'll note- no mention of winning an award from our professional organization. Whatevs. Just need to write the papers, keep the advisor happy, get a postdoc and get out. And perhaps after the epic scrum of writing the white paper I will have started to get over my panic about how all my writing is crap and be able to sit down and just slam this damned thing out. I've set a hard deadline of 40 weeks from this Friday for my defense as that would be my birthday and becoming a doctor on one's birthday wouldn't be the worst thing ever.