By this time of the day I’m getting tired of talking about it. But let me do this again for the sake of completion. Next time someone asks me, I can just refer them to this post and not have to recall the events of the day again.
My morning conversation with Dr. Robila:
- Robila:
- So, did you rehearse your presentation?
- Me:
- Well… I didn’t really rehearse-rehearse it. I kinda went over the slides several times in my head… I didn’t actually – you know – speak it out.
- Robila: [with an OMG WTF expression on his face]
- Oh…
- Me:
- Hey, I usually just wing these things. This is the most I prepared for a presentation in my life.
- Dr. Gutierez was probably the only person in the room who actually read my thesis and understood most of it. He had 3 pages of notes with minor corrections for me. Most of these were things like “eachother should be two words”, “change a to an here” and etc… Free proofreading! Yay!
- Dr. Antoniou asked a lot of questions that may or may have not been on topic, or relevant to the thesis.
- Dr. Benham didn’t say a word during the whole thing. I don’t think he fell asleep, but I might be wrong.
- Dr. Zaritski argued with Antiniou about parallel processing
- Dr. Jenq didn’t ask any questions – just had some comments to support of what I was saying
- Dr. Robila was very helpful diffusing Antoniou’s questions by claiming that the things he asked for were out of scope, or irrelevant to my research
- Dr. Deremer got there late because of parking issues. For those who do not go to MSU – finding a parking spot in the morning borders on a miracle. Apparently this also applies to faculty.
The presentation went fine. I actually even finished in the alloted time slot of 40-45 minutes even though I never really timed myself. As I said – I’m not a great speaker. I’m not even a good speaker. Ok, I’m a downright lousy public speaker. But I can wing it most of the time with little preparation, and actually make coherent points that don’t usually look like I’m reading my notes, or reciting from memory.
Here is what happened during the presentation. It’s probably funnier if you know the profs I will mention here but anyway:
The presentation slides are here if you want to check them out. I will probably post the thesis paper somewhere at some point. Not now though.
At the end I was asked if I’m going for a PHD. I said that I’m planning to work for a bit in the industry, and then possibly go back for a PHD. Some people said if I want a PHD I should go back right away. The problem is – I don’t know if I really want it. I mean it would be really awesome to get that title, but I don’t know if that’s how I want to spend the next few years of my life. I’m totally confused about the future at this point. I need a fucking vacation.
Of course I had a typo on the thesis signature page so I had to fix it and reprint it. This is ridiculous but my laptop was actually the only machine in the department with a working Latex installation that I knew of. And it booted to a fatal disk error. Whooptie do!
I was able to drop to single user and run fsck on the drive. It was churning away for about 20 minutes fixing all kinds of strange errors and inconsistencies. I have no clue how did my file system get corrupted like this. I did shut it down properly last time around. I’m guessing it might have happened when it crashed on me last week when I had these memory issues.
I finally managed to get it up and running, reprinted the signature page, tracked down all my committee members, made them sign it, and left the thesis at the Dean’s office for signature.
So it’s done! Now I just need to get some paperwork done so that I can actually graduate. But that’s a whole other story.
[tags]thesis, thesis defense, masters thesis, ms thesis, presentation, speach, msu, montclair[/tags]
Congratulations!
Congrats. It must feel good; one more year for me..
[quote comment=”4241″]Congrats. It must feel good; one more year for me..[/quote]
It still haven’t sinked in. I want to make sure I can graduate in May first – then I can feel relieved. :)
Well, I know this comment is a “bit” late but, I liked your thesis. It’s quite interesting. So, (if I understood ok) your thesis is about how to do distribute the process of reading and “mounting” of ultrahigh-def hyperspectral images, by finding a way to split the algorithm you mention into different processes or threads. Did I caught your thesis? or did I understand potatoes where you said apples?.
Almost. The algorithm is actually processing these images and doing feature extraction. You start with completely random arrays, then mess around with them, and you get a brand new image in which the components are separated (ie. forest shows up on one band, river on the other and etc..)
So I’m distributing the processing algorithm. Reading these images is basically just the initial step.