The final countdown

Well graduation is (hopefully) coming. There’s a long road between now and the big defense day, but the end is nigh! It feels weird getting to this point, but it’s also stressful because there’s still so much to get done I’m not sure it will happen. I have a feeling that others have felt the same way while they were wrapping up. So in the spirit of trying to update on a semi-regular schedule I figure at least once a week I can update everyone. That said let’s dive into what’s left, what’s next, and why I don’t think I will get a break anytime soon.

Five weeks.

That’s it, that’s all I’ve got to finish before I need to push it back to the winter term and I think we can all agree that I do not want to do that! I would prefer to be done with everything as soon as possible. So five weeks is the end of the line for me… well with any luck. Unfortunately five weeks isn’t the first major deadline I need to hit.

Three weeks

In three weeks I need to have my dissertation written and sent to the school for formatting check and my committee to read prior to my defense. I need to have it to my committee two weeks before my defense day and the last day to defend is basically the last day to get the formatting check done, so it wraps up somewhat nicely in that regard.

However my defense date is turning out to be a headache of it’s own. I have one neurosurgeon on the committee, one person is out of the country and will be coming back (unfortunately) very close to the deadline to defend (literally he’s flying the day or so before and won’t be available until after the deadline). One person is leaving the country around the same time, so I have a very tight window to make it all happen and the worst part is there’s a lot of stuff going on at work the week before the deadline to defend.

Overall, there’s a lot of things going on that are making things overly complicated, but getting a group of very busy people together in one room is worthy of a PhD all on its own. So we’ll see what happens. I hate to mention this because it hurts, but I had a date set! Until last night that is, as it turns out, school-PI is unavailable. Which means I’m back at square one and apologizing to everyone for the oversight and wasting their time.

65%

Assuming my dissertation is 100 pages long I’m officially at the 65% mark after some more writing today and I’m hopeful that after this update we can nudge that to 66-67%. I have one and a half chapters to write not including my conclusions, which will be written by the time I’m done with the rest of the stuff I need to do, because I’m not done with everything that needs to happen just yet.

Four days

Yep, that’s how long I have to get ready to complete the last two aims of my dissertation. So technically the second aim and third aim are very closely related (no spoilers, sorry everyone). But we haven’t had much luck with them, so it’s been reduced from 10 to 1, as in a single participant with a spinal cord injury. Which means I have a lot of work to do between now and then in order to get the ready for that test.

Thankfully I’ve already done one test last Friday to verify that most of it was working and it went about as good as I could expect. That is, I managed to get some data and what not to make sure that things were working properly. The catch is that it was like a third of the way done with the entire thing. Without going into too much detail think of it like a game, well we need to get to the end, but nothing is programed that far ahead yet, but it does give me a chance to make sure that it’s mostly working properly up to the point that it falls apart. The rest of the week will be a mad rush to get the code all programmed to do the full thing and not just the first part of it.

In short, the next five weeks will be a race to the finish line. It’s not going to be pretty, but the only way is through, so we push on. I’m keeping my fingers crossed I’ll be able to hit all the deadlines, but we’ll see (a theme of the post I guess). I’m hoping to get a better idea on when my dissertation will happen this week and I’m fairly confident (not really) that the rest of my coding project will go well.

The trick with that is that I have two people “assigned” to help me finish my dissertation and neither know anything about MATLAB so while I can pass along code to test, they cannot debug for me so I’m left doing it myself. That wouldn’t be a problem, except for the fact that most of the errors that they are running into are the basic spelling/ capitalization/ etc. errors so it takes days of sending code back and fourth for any real progress to happen.

While I am a bit annoyed by that fact, I also can’t hold it against them too much, they are just starting out and I wasn’t much better when I was starting the program. Mostly I’m just annoyed that I don’t have more time to spend at school and use the equipment and what not to verify everything is working properly.

And that about sums up everything going on at the moment and why I haven’t been able to update more regularly. I do promise to make an effort to make sure that I update as much as I can. Unfortunately, there’s a lot going on. But we’re nearly there!