Lorena and I planned to drive to Wichita last Friday for a working weekend. I turned out that the people with whom we were to work planned to leave after lunch on Saturday so we decided a conference call working session made a lot more sense than twelve hours of driving followed by four hours of work. I have a ton of things to accomplish at my day job and planned to spend the bulk of what time I had left on the weekend for that. I accomplished two things: the conference call (four hours on Saturday morning) and a lot of “contemplation” sessions with Kiwi like the one shown in the image above. Well, there was a little bit more to it than that–Kelly and Christian both called and we talked for long stretches on life and their current paths.
The talks with Kelly and Christian were the most productive parts of the weekend. Christian is at about the halfway point of his PhD program, living through the pain of his third Tempe summer and the bloom of graduate school is definitely off the rose. He is in a good place with his work–he and his professor are performing the final edits on a paper about the research he has performed over the last two years which they will submit in the next week or so. On the other hand, he spends so much time working, there is little time for anything else, so he is looking forward to the day when he can get a regular job where he goes to work in the morning, goes home in the evening and has weekends off–all in a place where the daytime temperature only hits triple digits four or five days per year.
Kelly, on the other hand, is not so enamored with the actual day to day work of her degree. She does not think she wants to do marketing research and/or be an academic, so she is trying to decide whether to finish where she just to have her graduate school complete forever, or switch graduate schools and go back to a degree and field that is a little bit more rigorous–probably in the use of statistics. It is a hard decision, but she has a great opportunity to go either way. The good thing is that she is thinking about it objectively. It might be worth it to just finish out–she is in a good place to do that academically, but if she hates it, she might be better served to step back, reconsider what she wants and move onto something for which she has a passion.
Lorena just came back from Seattle. She was up there for about five days to help Kelly because she has time for nothing but studying. In her PhD program she has to do two formal papers in addition to her dissertation. They are full-blown research projects with experiments and formal write-ups good enough they are often published in scholarly journals. Since first year students generally have never done such formal research, they have to learn everything from scratch. That was certainly true for Kelly. Kelly’s presentation of her first year paper takes place the second week of February and she is working every waking hour on the paper, her TA responsibilities, research for her advisor and the classes she has to take.
Christian sent me the paper he wrote as partial fulfillment of his qualifying examination and will turn it in later today. He does the oral qualification examination for his PhD on Friday, his last day as a teenager. What a great way to leave teenager-hood. Actually, he has done much more than we ever anticipated he might do by this time in his life. He has a few more classes after this, but the bulk of his time will be spent on identification of a research topic (he has a pretty good idea what it will be, but needs more specifics) followed by research for his dissertation.
If I have the time right, Christian, at this very moment, is presenting his Information Theory research at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. This is the first time he has done this kind of formal presentation (with a tie and all that). It is the culmination of a full year of research in a brand new (to Christian) area of Mathematics and Electrical Engineering. Lorena and I are on pins and needles waiting to hear how it went. If all goes well, this should eventually turn into a refereed conference paper and, with expanded research and content, possibly even a refereed journal article.
