Dr. Jennie

What fun.

My defense talk was around 15 mins. I had timed it at 20 but my normal talking speed exponentially increased. People don't complain about short talks but it would have been nice to include a few slides I left out because my talk was initially 45 mins. 20-30min is a decent length in my department. At my preliminary defense the chair of my committee commended me on my short talk.

A professor came up to me afterwards and said I did a great job explaining everything. He said one always worries about going to a talk that isn't their field and having everything go over their head but my data was well explained. I left out 99% of my methods, which I think it the part that can get confusing, and for my data it wasn't very important how the values were measured.

The closed committee part was great. It was a lot of fun to hear what everyone thought of my work and I feel I had good answers to their questions.

The outside member had a lot of comments that he said may not be necessary for the thesis but will be an issue for publication. In general I need to buff up the conclusion sections of all chapters and better describe the research objectives. I have until Aug. 15th to accomplish this. The final copy will be on a CD and I can directly mail that to the graduate school.

Tonight is a party at my advisers house that pretty much everyone I've talked to can't go to. Fun. Then I fly out early tomorrow and hopefully get on the road west on Monday.

It feels good to have this accomplished although I don't think I'll feel official until I've mailed in the dissertation.