Category: Retirement PhD

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.

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.

I am anywhere from four to ten years from retirement. I really do not like the idea of retirement. I do neither fish nor golf although I do not mind doing either, but on a once or twice a year basis, not every day. I would like to take up guitar and/or saxophone. I have a saxophone and Christian says I can use his old acoustic guitar–he moved on to classical guitar a long time ago. The problem with that is two-fold–I will always be really bad at it for everyone else but me and it still does not get me out of the house and fill my days with anything meaningful. So I have trying to figure out what to do.

I have been talking to my GaugeCam buddies. One of them is a tenure track professor at University of Nebraska. The other is still at North Carolina State University. There are lots and lots of research they want to do, but for which they do not have time, money, and or help that has the sometimes odd skills they need to do make it happen. We are talking now about whether it might be possible to start an unfunded PhD program that I can do as a hobby for now, then as a full time project after I require. If I do, I will FINALLY have something fun to talk about other than the trivialities of my life on my blog again. I am not sure whether or not it will work out yet, but I will start reporting on my efforts here.