Oh, So Done

The original plan for this was to be three separate posts:

My Thesis is Done!
My Thesis Presentation is Done!
My Exams are Done (and therefore so is my Undergrad)

But there were other significant deadlines involved. I handed in my thesis last Monday morning and almost the next moment dove into the next thing that had to be finalized. There were two papers for two of my electives, two tests to be studied for, and the thesis presentation, which my department treated as a shorter version of a graduate thesis defense this year. All these things were due or scheduled before noon on Friday (well, one test was online and just had to be completed by 2pm, but I didn’t want to push things quite that close to the wire).

They all got done. They all went well, with a bump or two here and there, one of which totally made sense and one of which I knew was going to happen on the way in. I also found two errors in my thesis report while writing the presentation slides, which was annoying. And not typo kind of errors, because I’m sure there are still a couple of those, but “hey, the totals at the bottom of these two columns are wrong in this table”, and “you counted this object twice just because you looked at it in two wavelength bands”.

And I had arranged things so that it was just thesis and fun electives for my last term. As things turned out, only two of those fun electives had exams scheduled. Due to the substantial extenuating circumstance of a particular strike (the first of its kind) going on at my school, those two exams got cancelled and the marks rolled over into other things. I still would have been done early (the 10^th), but the past week might have been a little less stressful.

But it’s over. I’m done. All the boxes checked, all the assignments, papers, presentations handed in. Only the final grades and convocation remain. All of the work going into my undergraduate degree is complete. I’m trying to be fairly quiet about that as folks who are taking the last couple of physics courses needed for their degrees, that I’ve either already taken or am in a different stream so don’t need, still have another week or so until the last exam. But I get to celebrate a bit. More importantly, I can ease back on the caffeine and maybe sleep a little more than I have been lately. Probably write a lot more than I have been lately, too.

And I’ve got nearly a month until I become a graduate student on May 1^st, which is a new stage on the journey. More on that another day. Probably on a number of other days.

Be well, everyone.

Oh, and: “Early Signs of Structure in Protostellar Disks: Categorizing Class 0 and Class I Young Stellar Objects”. Questions will be treated seriously and given real answers. Have you ever met someone in science who doesn’t want to talk about their research? Well, once they had something to actually report, that is. Maybe before, but probably not long before.