Category: Retirement PhD Page 3 of 6

I am grateful my adviser, Troy, at University of Nebraska-Lincoln funded tuition and fees for my Ph.D. It was a bit of an odd situation. I was a full-time student, but with a full-time job. Normally, full-time students for a degree like this are paid a living stipend that I did not really want. Honestly, I think it was a pretty good deal for both of us. My contribution, bringing 40 years experience to the program in terms of research and networking, were a good bit more than what a more traditional Ph.D. student coming directly from a Bachelors or Masters degree, or even a student with a few years experience. I had worked as a volunteer for 14 years before I started the program and really wanted to continue to contribute as a volunteer during the program, so I forwent the stipend. I got a chance to volunteer and a Ph.D. and Troy got a Ph.D. student for roughly half-price relative to what he normally has to pay. It would have been a lot less for him, but he had to pay out-of-state tuition because I was not accepting the stipend as a Graduate Research Assistant.

Special accommodations were required because I was a non-traditional, full-time employed student working remotely. The tuition and fees payments got fouled up virtually every semester I was in school. In fact, it is still fouled up, because every semester they charged a late fee when they fouled up the payment. That is the last $35 dollars on my account. Now Troy has to go through the hassle of getting the late fee remove–I cannot do it myself.

It is a remarkable day in this trajectory for which, as I said previously, I am very grateful.

I am not sure whether it is official now or will be official when I get the diploma in December. Either way, it feels pretty cool to have everything official recognized as complete. It has been a long haul, but I have loved every minute of it. I have been talking with my Thesis Adviser, Troy about how I can contribute as a volunteer to keep my hand on this. We already have some ideas. I plan to put up a little more of this work here than I have in the past, but it will only happen in fits and spurts going forward. Another good aspect of this project is that I have engaged a couple of other work buddies to join the fun. One of them is about half-way through his Ph.D. while the other is working with UNL, but not scheduled to start for at least a few more months.

Got my final grades today. Kind of sad to be leaving UNL. It was a great run. Still going to participate, but it won’t be the same as just a volunteer.

My dissertation defense on June 8, 2023 was successful. I must say that it was a great way to end sixty or so years of academic effort–a lot of it, not so successful. Lorena and I drove up to Lincoln from Texas, while Christian flew out from Boston to join us. We hung out with very good friends, ate really good food, and just had a stellar time. Today, the revised dissertation was submitted to the publishing service, I signed up for walking in the graduation ceremony (December 15, 2023) and purchased my cap, gown, and hood. Looking forward to the ceremony and celebration! Now all I need to do is figure out what to do next.

Still on track to graduate in December, 2023. After my dissertation was submitted to my committee, two of the members designated as readers recommended a few changes and approved the dissertation as ready for defense. I have submitted the paperwork for department approval, after which I will be able to schedule a room for the event. I have vacation scheduled to travel to Lincoln for the defense, Christian has a ticket to fly out to provide moral support. The plan, God willing, is to drive to Omaha the day before the event to pick up Christian, then defend on June 8. It seems more real now than when I was in the middle of it. Can hardly believe I am this close to the end.

I had all kinds of good plans about how I was going to document this chase to a PhD, but when it came right down to it, I just did not have the energy to write with both a full-time day-job and and a full-time load of research and classes. Actually, all of these kinds of things are choices in the the end–and I chose laziness in self-defense.

Today is a seminal day in my trajectory. My thesis advisor gave me permission to submit the final draft of my dissertation so the “readers,” two members of the committee can read it and decide whether they think it is worthy of defense. He also told me there was literally nothing for me to do until they got back to me. Actually, that is not quite true. I can work on the slide presentation for my defense just in case they approve the dissertation.

Fall semester 2022 is complete. I have one class left to complete all the required coursework need for the PhD. The class I am taking is titled “Likelihood and Bayesian Ecology” and I am very much excited about it. It should not only inform my research at University of Nebraska, but also the work I do in my day job. If I am able to complete the course successfully, all I will have left are 21 research credits, a dissertation, and a dissertation defense. The class is a three week, three credit short course. We meet three hours per day, January 3-5. The hard part is that I need to take three hours per day for the fourteen class days and do all the homework while still managing my day job. Hopefully, I can do one more hard push to get this out of the way.

After the course work, I need to finish my research and write my dissertation. I have all of the data I need to do that now. God willing, I will be able to finish everything and defend my dissertation before my next birthday. Of course, I want to walk the graduation which will be in December, but I will have finished my PhD at the moment the dissertation is successfully defended.

I just finished the written portion of my PhD comprehensive exam. They were actually quite excellent exams. The questions were way more open-ended than I expected. I spent 6.5 hours writing the first two days, 5.5 hours the third day and 10 hours today. I could have written a LOT more. The cool diagram above is one I created to describe the hardware for the system I designed as part of my research–but I am not a hardware guy so I do not have much of a clue about that. I mostly just wrote the software and designed the vision algorithms.

With the written portion of the comprehensive exam a little over a week away, it is nice to have our Tech Note show up in the Water Resources Research journal. After the comps, if I pass, it is on to the oral portion of the exam, my second to last class and the writing of a third article in the fall.

Here is the link to the article: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022WR033203

A Technical Note I submitted about the free, open-source, commercial friendly software I wrote as part of my dissertation research has been accepted for publication by the Water Resources Research journal. As soon as I get a link to the article I will put it up here. Here is the GUI from the software about which the paper is written.

I have completed the first two-thirds of my dissertation research and am now well into my final project. The goal is to measure water level in images of a stream where a specially designed target is installed. One of the really fun parts of this project is that we have gotten great pictures of lots of birds and animals in our images. Ducks, deer, bison, raccoon, beaver, herons, etc., etc., etc. The target you see installed in the image above is an early failure in our research effort. That target will be replaced with one that can be seen better under IR lighting at night. It should be in place taking pictures by the middle of this month.

Just a bookkeeping note. I just finished speaking with my adviser. We decided life would be a lot easier for the both of us if we pushed out my graduation one semester to Spring 2023. I changed the countdown timer to reflect the new date. It will even out the funding for my adviser and give me a little more time to finish the last third of my research and then write and defend my dissertation. All good!

Christian finished his PhD at about the same time as I started mine–at the end of 2019. That is not precisely true because I understand you have the thing as soon as you successfully defend your dissertation and he defended his in August of 2019. I started the University of Nebraska Lincoln PhD program in January of 2020. So, now I am at the make-or-break point of my program–the comprehensive exam. Up until I pass the comprehensive exam, I am merely a PhD student. When I pass the exam, that makes me a PhD “candidate.” Everyone hears horror stories about comprehensive exams. I have two months to prepare. Luckily, I have my partner in crime, John S. and a (mostly) great committee helping out. John is a non-traditional (read old) grad student like me and it is really nice to have him along for the ride. I will keep you posted on how it goes.

All my homework is complete for Spring Semester 2022. There are is only one more class to attend where I will present my final ArcGIS project. Then, I will only have two three hour classes and an additional 30 credits of research before my credit requirements will be complete. I am scheduled to take my Comprehensive Exam and present my thesis proposal in January 2023 with the goal of completing my dissertation defense before the end of Spring Semester 2023. This summer will be spent on doing the research for my third and final paper. The three papers, when completed will be the three chapters of my dissertation. The plan for this summer is to finish the software and start processing images that have not yet been captured yet. The camera is on Turkey Creek in something called the Kearney Outdoor Learning Area (KOLA) south of Kearney West High School near Kearney, Nebraska. It is a beautiful setting and I am glad it is there. The latest functionality added to the research software (GRIME2) is shown in the video below.

It is going to be a very busy semester. I have a three credit class in the use of ArcGIS in Hydrology, a one credit seminar, and six research credits, but this next few months is going to be very busy in my day job and the house models in Mexico are still in full swing. We will be transitioning from the apartment building remodel to our own house up on the hill, hopefully, in March. In the meantime, the reviews for the initial submission of my second journal article have returned so I have to find time to a response and revisions required to be completed by March 18 but I am hoping to complete it by the end of February.

The latest fun thing with my research is that I have ported the GaugeCam GRIME2 programs to a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. Hopefully, we will use it for research on camera based water level measurement in a small nature preserve just south of Kearney High School in Kearney Nebraska where we will be testing the ability of GRIME2 to create calibrations from a new style of calibration target inspired by the ubiquitous, octagonal, red stop sign.