Progress

What a day! Thesis committee meeting, and of that, the last one! Next up: write my thesis and defend it! Wohooo, in a few months, if all goes as planned, you can call me Dr. Julie :) Never thought this day would ever come. There had definitely been some days, weeks, even months, when the idea that I would once graduate from grad school and even get a PhD was more of a dream, not a very real one either. Fittingly, I chose this cartoon as my closing slide, which elicited some smiles even from my adviser. Hehe...

For some reason, I was super nervous before the meeting, maybe because I was presenting some of my newest results, which nobody has seen yet and which is very much still a work in progress without any conclusions or even a sense of what the data means. On top of that, one of my committee members is an expert who works on something very similar and my data happens to contradict some of his results. But, he was super nice and helpful, and even said that "even though there are some differences in our systems, your results do not directly contradict ours". Well, they sort of do, but it was nice of him to say that. I waved good-bye to them by saying "see you at my defense" which is something I never thought I would say. So I am thinking mid to late spring - April would be awesome!

To celebrate, I first took a nap - hadn't done that in some time now! Wonderful! Then headed down to Beth Israel. I stopped by Barnes and Noble to pick up our new book club book to read while traveling this weekend. As I walked into the store, there were thousands of people - not normal even for Union Sq. I figured there was some event going on but I just headed to the Fiction section to quickly find my book. That happened to be on the same floor as the event space and when I got up there, people were sitting everywhere on the floor, standing so tightly it was hard to move. I tried to squeeze my way around the crowd to the authors starting with the letter M. At one point, a security guard tried to shove me out of the way saying "make way!", to which I looked up, just in time to see that I was about to bump into Steve Martin, surrounded by some other security people. I managed to get out of the way and only slightly brush shoulders with him. He seemed very tall and shiny: bright white hair, really nice suit, very good looking actually. Turns out he writes books too and he was there to read an excerpt from his new novel - a New York love story. I listened to a bit while I was searching for my book, but then seeing the ridiculous crowd, I just quickly made my way out. Ah, New York, how I love thee!

Not a bad day. This was followed by a huge burrito from Chipotle, the purchase of a nice new pair of boots, and now I feel complete! And now I am ready for vacation, hello Thanksgiving, hello Kansas!