Secret Project HALIBUT - April 10th, 2007 [entries|archive|friends|userinfo] grendelkhan [ website | last 20 edits on wikipedia ] [ userinfo | livejournal userinfo ] [ archive | journal archive ]

April 10th, 2007

a doctoral defense. [Apr. 10th, 2007|02:21 am] I got up relatively early this morning to go see Eric give his doctoral defense. We drove up to campus, parked in the garage, and realized that I had forgotten where he was giving his defense. I went up to the ECE departmental office (I didn't go to the CSE office because, frankly, it would be awkward to run into the professor whose class I ditched so I could go graduate), and they called his department, and found out where he would be giving the presentation. It was given in a very nice conference room. Eric had slides and a whiteboard, and the audience consisted of Carin and me, some of his fellow grad students, his parents and his committee, which apparently included a leading expert in solid oxide fuel cell technology. He was nervous as hell; he read his slides, he got knocked off balance by his committee, and he flubbed a basic electrochemistry question because he was so jittery. It's understandable, but it was a little painful to watch. I could understand part of what his research was about; I had known he was working on fuel cells, but I hadn't know that he was working on fuel cells in order to build better unmanned underwater weapons. I wonder how he feels about that--he's a very outdoorsy-hippie type. (Not that wardrobe is equivalent to politics, but this was the first time I'd ever seen him in a button-down shirt, much less an actual suit.) Regardless of the political implications, he's the first person from his family to get a doctorate. His thesis committee wanted him to do some more work, which is apparently pretty standard. His folks beamed at him, Carin and I congratulated him on his achievement, and then we had to dash off to get me to work for the second half of the day. Work wasn't nearly as interesting. I had more customer issues to take care of than I did before, but that was about it. I honestly don't mind running one-off issues and holding their hands for desktop issues; the only thing that bothers me is getting contradictory orders and getting chewed out for it... and since that didn't happen, I'm fine with it. Comments: Pandagon link post comment

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