Category: Retirement PhD Page 3 of 5

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.

I submitted article number 2 last night which should turn into the second third of my dissertation. It had to do with the release of the GRIME2 software package as a free, open-source application with commercial-friendly licensing. I have now started work on my third and final article. When I have three, then my dissertation research is complete and all I have to do is accumulate them into a dissertation. Of course there are other procedural, exam, and classes to be completed but it is a great milestone.

A colleague of mine, John S., has joined me to start his PhD in Natural Resources Science at University of Nebraska. He is a highly skilled software architect and an image processing application development expert with decades of experience. He is less than ten years younger than I am so I am sure the average age of the PhD students in our department has gone up a good chunk. We will be doing a hydrology independent study class together and his research will extend some of the stuff I have already started. Honestly, his programming skills are broader and deeper than mine so he will be a huge addition to the program. I am really looking forward to working with him.

As for me, I will be two credits short of half way complete (will have 43, need 90) after fall semester. After that, I have four more classes to take, research to perform, comprehensive exams, and a dissertation and defense and I am done. There is some chance I can get this all done by the end of Fall 2023, God willing, but it will probably be Spring 2024 if I am being realistic. I am still really enjoying it, but have been disabused of any notion that I want to wallow in the petty politics of academia and especially in academic publications. That being said, I really enjoy writing and hope to continue to contribute scholarly work through Troy and his colleagues at UNL if/after I graduate.

My class on the Google Earth Engine API is about to end. It has been a very interesting class from a professor who is giving it online for the first time. She has actually done a stellar job. There are two difficulties in this class: How do you give a good online experience (via Zoom–hate it, there are much better tools) and how do you teach a class to a group of student who fall into two very distinct groups–those who are programmers, but know little about earth sciences and those who are very knowledgeable about earth sciences, but know little about programming. I have to admit that I have gotten a LOT more than I expected out of the class and, if I can work it in and have time, I am going try to work it into my dissertation. The professor really did strike a good balance between getting the programming across and getting the earth science across without making either of those parties either crazy or bored. Loved it.

Tomorrow morning I start the second class for my PhD program. The first one was a one month course on time series analysis that met for a couple hours twice per week. I received one credit for that course. The course that starts tomorrow is also a short course which meets three times per week for two hours of lecture via Zoom and one our of lab. It is a course on how to use the Google Earth Engine API (javascript) and the publicly available datasets. I got myself an account and went through the first tutorial. It looks pretty slick and fun to program. The cool part is that Lorena played with Google Earth (not the API) in her last Geology class. That gave me a sense for how powerful it is for visualization and research. I am really looking forward to learning this material.

We just received notice that our first article titled Camera-based Water Stage and Discharge Prediction with Machine Learning has been accepted for peer review by the Hydrology and Earth System Science .Journal (HESS). It is an online journal that selects two or more official reviewers, but is also left open for public review and comment for two months. This does not mean the article has been accepted for publication, but it is the first step in the process with the hope that we can get it accepted.

In the meantime, we have defined the research plan for the next article which will partly a replication study and partly the development of tools that make it easier for others to duplicate our work. According to my defined “program of study,” I have to write three of these articles to get to the point where I can take start writing my dissertation. In addition to that, I have to take 5-7 additional courses to combine with my Masters degree courses before I have met the minimum requirements of the plan. It seems like there is a ton left to do, but it also seems like we are off to a good start. We will find out if that is true or not by seeing if this paper gets accepted.