Its Official...

... I am a doctoral candidate! This very happy event happened last month. The defense itself was pretty easy going. The worst part for me was giving the presentation, since it seemed so pointless. Ok, your dissertation committee has read what is sent to them and so they obviously have heard all of what will be included in the presentation before. It was just so dull and unnecessary for me and for them. I knew the literature, what I am trying to accomplish with the research study and I had some ideas of what I might find. All of this was clearly visible in what I had sent to them to read. After the presentation the committee members each asked a question (or several) and then we had a sort of pow-wow about how to make things better / stronger / tighter, other things that I might want to look at, how to proceed forward and the timeline I should try to follow. Contrary to how defenses are usually discussed, I found the whole experience very supportive.

The story of how I got to that point is the real story and so I will blog about this another time. It was a fairly wild ride for a month or so before because of time constraints. Weeeeeeeee!