First PhD anniversary¶

Two days ago was 15 January 2008. One year ago I defended my thesis and became a PhD. Hurray :-) Still happy with it.

Quite a load came off my shoulders that day: it was the final deadline of an (in my case) 5.5 year project. There's so much that to be done before that and at the end there are numerous deadlines (all the signatures of the professors by this date, all their comments on that date, the final copy has to go to the printer, etc). Quite a lot of stress. So many tasks disappeared out of my to-do list that day.   There are two loose ends I still have to tie up:

• My professor, Frits Tolman, invited me to work on a summary paper. I didn't   do much beyond brainstorming. In the mean time, another author has left the   university. I think I'd best shelve that for the moment.
• A former colleague, Kees Woestenenk, wrote an article with highly critical   comments on   my thesis. There are a lot of factual errors in that article, so any   rebuttal would be quite critical by consequence. I've made a start, but   stopped after a few pages: the content just wasn't positive. This is   something I'll have to finish off, though. Which I just   did .