Well, the thesis is out to committee. The internal committee anyway (they get first dibs to turn it down). Once we get the hopeful okay from them, it’ll go out to the external and we can set a defense date (scary). There’s still a time crunch for June graduation, but it’s out of my hands at this point.
However, it does mean, that right now, I need to shift focus again. I’ve still got lots of startup stuff in the works, so no real shifting there. But, when it comes to research/PhD stuff, it’s now back to working on papers. In my thesis I mention that there are three papers under consideration. Now we just need to make that a reality.
Paper 1 I’ve been working on for the past couple of months as it was based on the experiment I ran in the fall. It’s mostly done, waiting for a pass by my supervisor for some cleaning up for it. And then we should get it submitted (deadline is mid February). Paper 2 has been sitting my supervisors inbox since August (yeah…) waiting for his pass. It’s being written by three of us, and so just need him to do a pass and then probably at least one more round.
Paper 3 is turning a rejected paper from last June into a journal paper. This morning, I worked on just getting the paper over into the correct format. It’s been a struggle. I like latex, really, I do. But sometimes… Anyway, once it’s in the right format, the next step is for me to go through and update, edit, add, remove and so on. It’s going from conference to journal and we have more space. Which means I can add in more related work, and more clearly explain the experiment and results.
It’s important that these papers get submitted, because I will likely be going into my defense without any resolution on them (accepted/rejected) and I have very few published papers (3 – but only 1 of those is on my PhD research). And this doesn’t look great – since publication shows that the wider academic community is accepting of the results. With the three submitted, then we can at least say that there were four possible papers out of the work. But I’m also hoping that they just get accepted to. Even if I don’t stick around academia, it’d be nice to have a few of those behind my name.
We likely have almost two months to do this, but I’d like to get it off my plate earlier. Because more things will keep getting piled on. And once I have a defense date, I’ll also need to start preparing a presentation (and getting ready to be grilled). This year (or at least the first half) is going to fly by.
Surviving Grad School 