The proposal defense date

Okay not going to lie I had a minor freakout the past few days. One of my committee members wasn’t responding to my emails so I could not schedule my proposal defense. Last night out of the blue, reality smacked me in the face and it occurred to me that next week was the first week I was trying to schedule and time was running out. People are busy and I didn’t want any of the PI’s to have a conflict. But it all worked out…

Sometimes the universe just really wants to screw with you and nothing seems to go right. Experiments you were really looking forward to doing get scrapped for example and there are a ton of delays that make it seem like none of the exciting things you want to do will be be happening this year. People in general may be pretending the pandemic is over, but it most definitely is not and it is still causing all sorts of issues.

However, it would appear that for the moment that isn’t the case! Between yesterday’s surprise equipment and the email I got today things are looking up. That’s right, this morning my final committee member responded to the poll and I have a date and time locked in (assuming the universe doesn’t collapse on itself). And I wasn’t panicking before, well aside from last night’s realization that the proposed time frame was fast approaching, but now that I have a formal day and time I’m a little nervous! Mostly I’m anxious because there’s still a bit of work I need to do between now and when I defend my proposal.

That’s right, I’ve been slacking a bit on my slides. But for good reason! Both the project at the hospital, which I need to come up with some code name for since I will be talking about it a lot more now that we’re getting close to finishing, and the robot paper have eaten all my time! But it’s okay, I still have a little bit of time and hopefully there will be at least one (or more) chances to practice before the big day.

Okay, enough suspense. My proposal defense is scheduled tentatively for Friday April 22nd at 8am pacific time (PT). Somewhat side note (since I’m famous for those) picking a timezone to give everyone was hard! I know most of my readers are in the US like me, but there are a significant number of people who are not. I probably should’ve picked something random like Greenwich Mean Time, but I went with the “safe” US west coast time.

Anyway, since the date and time are set I now need to figure out how to best disseminate the link to anyone who wants to attend, because you are all most certainly invited. Heck if you’re local you’re more than welcome to attend in person (if you’re comfortable with that sort of thing). I have about a week to figure out how to share the link for anyone who wants to come, but for now if you would like to attend, you now at least know the when! Also as a bonus, you’ll finally get to hear about “super secret technique,” yep because that’s what my proposal is on so we’ll be talking about it in depth and showing some of the results I had from my qualifying exam.

I’ll be creating a zoom link or at the least I’ll be using our labs zoom meeting room for the event, so it shouldn’t be hard to share once I get that part figured out. I’m thinking of just saying send me an email (hey I have a handy email form right here on the blog!) and I’ll send you the link when the day/time comes, but I may try to come up with a better way. In the meantime feel free to email me and I’ll send out the link the night before or so. For everyone else, I’ll try to come up with a better system.

The proposal itself is scheduled to last one hour. Now that doesn’t mean it will run for a full hour, in fact it will probably run long. That depends a lot on the questions I get from my committee and the questions I get from the audience. So if you attend no hard questions! (Kidding…. not really!) For reference, my qualifying exam was scheduled to last 30-45 minutes and ran almost three hours long because of all the questions I got. This well almost certainly not be that long! However, just be aware that it can run long if you do plan on attending. I’m mostly (98%) confident it will run the 30-45 minutes we have planned for the proposal though, under an hour almost certainly. The proposal is more of a formality at this point so it’s not like my qualifying exam which was literally a test (hence exam).

Well yeah, so this happened. Now I just need to get through the next week. With my proposal defense a little over a week away, I have some work to do!