It has been a long time since I have been in college. Fortunately, my adviser from UTEP where I did my Masters degree, Dr. Carroll Johnson, is still around and willing to write a recommendation. He is what a professor should be–truly looking out for his students while maintaining high academic standards. In addition, because of my volunteer work with professor Francois Birgand from the Biological and Agricultural Engineering department at NCSU, I have a second academic recommendation with whom I hope and plan to continue working whether this thing works out or not. After that, I got a couple of stellar industrial references with whom I have worked for over thirty years. I hope it is good enough. In my discussions with the professor who is sponsoring me, he said that if I meet the bare minimum, his recommendation will carry more weight than recommendations. Still they cannot hurt. Next come the transcripts. Some of them are over 40 years old. Who knows how that will go. The one funny deal is that if you are wanting to get a Masters degree, the transcripts can be no older than ten years old, but if you want a PhD, there is no expire date.
Month: October 2018
After some discussion over the last couple of days, I have taken the first step toward really figuring whether I can do a retirement PhD with some old friends. More importantly, if I do not take these first few baby steps, I will never even figure out whether I actually want to do this. What did I do? I filled out an application form, sent in my $50 application fee, and reported in to my potential professors. In addition to that, I started writing the abstract for a refereed journal article that describes some of the work we did on the GaugeCam project that could be a foundation for future work. I still have a lot of trepidation about the idea and if it requires me to take too many classes or get to high a score on the GRE, it might make just make more sense to just do the fun part that I know how to do (vision research) and forget the rest. Who knows though? I might enjoy the process.