Lock Down Defense

So, I am technically a Doctoral Candidate now.

But if anything, I feel somewhat dumber now.

The proposal defense was sort of anti-climactic, actually. To some extent, this process is just trying to minimize the downside. Namely, you just want to make sure that you pass. No matter how good your proposal is, it's just a proposal, after all. And, I was pretty sure that my advisor wasn't going to let me send anything out to my committee unless it was good enough to pass. And I knew that there were some flaws to my proposal, so I had no illusions about it being perfect.

I walked into the room, got everything set up, and then they asked me to leave, so that they could talk about things by themselves. This is a rather nervous few minutes, actually. You're out in the hallway for 10 minutes, just wondering about what could go wrong. Then, I came in, and started presenting. Normally, I expect to have professors just tear into your theoretical arguments right off the bat. Instead, there were basically no questions at all for the first half of my presentation. Later, I found out that the committee actually liked my theoretical arguments quite a bit. But it was sort of interesting to have no real comments. Then I got into my proposed experiments. And this is when I started feeling dumb. As I start explaining what it is that my hypotheses were, I noticed that I had made a mistake in my presentation, and in my actual paper, getting something backward. Whoops. Not only is that embarrassing, but you start wondering about how you let that slip through.

I made a couple choices with my experiments, essentially only testing a part of my theoretical framework, and leaving the rest for future research. They hated that idea, suggesting (very accurately, actually) that what I was doing was sort of over-promising, and not delivering. And, there were some very legit comments about my experiments, as well. Basically, I need to trim down my very nicely crafted conceptual framework so that what I'm testing is the focus of the dissertation, and everything else is placed as implications and future research. After I take care of that (which isn't actually too difficult), I'll need to re-design some experiments (which may be a bit of a pain).

I get all of this feedback, and then they send me out of the room again. And this time, I'm out there wondering if I had screwed up bad enough so that they were going to fail me. And a few minutes later, everyone calls me back in, tells me that I passed, and we smile and shake hands. Go figure. To make it even less exciting, I still had to teach my class that afternoon, and by the time I got done with that, I was too zonked out to do anything remotely interesting (score some crack or heroin, call in a team of midgets, hookers, and midget-hookers, and/or play online poker), other than head out and watch some basketball and have a buffalo chicken sandwich (which was excellent).

But, this process is over with. And it's time to start thinking about interviewing for a job. I hear that Wendy's is hiring...

-Chairman