34
Bill got a date! At his meeting with his advisor last night, they started hammering out actual details on the way to graduation. And in a rare moment of reasonableness and rationality and respect, Scott agreed to a defense date of May 21.
There's of course a bit more chemistry to do and the actual writing of the dissertation, but plans -- real plans, concrete plans, goals, ends -- now exist. Thanks to the rapport that Bill has built with Scott over the last 6 years, and the spirit of collaborative intellectual peers (rather than slave and master) that Bill has tried to exude, Bill might actually be in control of his own destiny here. This is good news, folks, this is really good news. It means we might actually be able to leave Chambana!
Now before you get too excited and start researching plane schedules or anything like that, this is not an end like your last final exam of college followed by a graduation ceremony. By all accounts, the defense ends up being sort of anticlimactic. Even though you enter the room a graduate student and emerge (if all goes well) a doctor, you're not a free-agent doctor yet. Even though you might only be at work a half-day that day (going home at 2 to sleep), there's inevitably more experiments the committee (a.k.a. Scott) wants run. You go to work the next day like a normal day. And the days after that too. There's the correcting the dissertation and working in those last-minute experiments and the paperwork and the checking-out process. And so you start to do all those things left to do like you've done all the things you've had to do for 6 years. Probably in the middle of this time you invite some friends out for a drink to celebrate, where you talk about lab and chemistry and this problem and that problem and you complain about Scott and you kvetch and laugh and sigh, all like normal. And then one day a while later you realize you've done everything on your list. And then that's it. It crept up on you and you're a free agent all of a sudden and you leave work at the end of the day carrying your lunchbox. You go home and have dinner and when you wake up the next day you move house.
But of course that moving house can never happen without first the defending. So we're very excited. Very excited to know when the end will begin. The end will begin! On May 21!
35
36
37
38