Can you botch your thesis presentation? Of course!

Today has been a bit of a crazy day, because I had meetings in the office all morning and at the university in the afternoon, so I was not going to be able to drive the kids for swimming training. Unfortunately that meant that I would have to drive the kids to school, come back home and then go to the office by bus, all before 09:00. Luck seemed to be on my side this morning, so even if I found some traffic on the way back from school and missed the bus at 08:03, I did manage to catch the one at 08:18 and make my meeting. Of course, I was not at the top of my strength by then, but it was a working meeting, with a lot of suggestions, active discussions, exchange of viewpoints, etc., so I have to say it did not take me long before I was back to my cruise speed.

In the PhD student meeting, the talk was a rehearsal for a thesis defense which was, in my view, completely bloated, with 60 slides full of text for a presentation that we expected to last 25 minutes. The biggest problem is that the student is a great student, who has worked a lot, well beyond the initial scope of the thesis, and intends to present every one of her results. Unfortunately, the work is so big and has so many aspects to it that there is no way she will be able to present it all. The professor argued that she should present one single questions and the answer that she has developed for it, giving up on all the history, the process for arriving at that solution, all the alternatives that were discarded, etc, and I can only agree. Fortunately, she still has two weeks to go, so hopefully she will be able to re-work the presentation.

Photo: Johan Jönson

 

By the time the presentations were done I checked with Karen and she was having a coffee just outside the swimming hall, so I took the bus and joined her while we waited for the kids to come out. The weather has been a bit cold all day, so it was good to sit in the sun for a while.

Now I have just spent two hours finishing the programming assignments of the course, which rendered quite pretty plots (but then I am a bit of a nerd, am I not?). I have also started to figure out the line of the presentation that I will give for the PhD students, so all in all it has been a quite successful day. See you tomorrow!