Graduate school by the numbers

I’ve been pretty quiet on here and on twitter, because I’m within 3 weeks of defending my PhD dissertation.

It’s taken me 6 1/2 years, longer than most people, but I’ll be finished before I’m, 30, which was a long-standing goal (technically I’ll be 30 by the time the degree is officially conferred at the end of the semester, but I’ll be finished with the requirements more than a month before my birthday).

But 2 weeks ago I finished a complete draft, and in 1 week I send it off to my committee to comment on, and then on October 12th I defend it, and then I have another 2 weeks after that to make the final set of revisions. By October 27th I’ll be totally and completely done. This is nerve-wracking when it isn’t out-right terrifying (although the job search has me more terrified - I haven’t been looking for long, but I also have no solid prospects as of yet, just a bunch of jobs that I haven’t heard anything back about).

One really nice thing about coming to the end, though, is the ability to make a concrete evaluation of all of the stuff that I’ve made and things I’ve done in the process. Herewith is a little list of of it:

Dissertation Research

  • 2900+ lines of Java code
  • uncountable lines of R code (~15,000)
  • 8 GB of code, data, and results

Dissertation

  • 5 chapters
  • 363 pages
  • 79,095 words
  • 134 tables
  • 147 figures
  • 75 unique references

Other Research

  • 8 distinct research projects
  • 4 first author/co-first author papers
  • 7 total papers
  • 3 first author abstracts
  • 8 total abstracts
  • 4 conferences attended

Academic

  • 14 graded courses taken
  • 7.4 cumulative GPA (out of a possible 8.0)
  • 2 professors who have disliked me
  • 2 professors I’ve disliked
  • 100% overlap between those sets
  • 4 semesters as a doctoral pre-candidate
  • 9 semesters as a doctoral candidate

Personal

  • 1 apartment over the entire time
  • 2 cars owned
  • ~50K miles driven
  • ~$80K student loan debt
  • 3 ipods owned
  • 4 cameras owned
  • 7 cellphones owned
  • 2 laptops owned
  • 3 desktops owned
  • 3 game consoles owned
  • 8 trips to the pistol range
  • 4 trips to the rifle range
  • 2 times trap shooting

Medical

  • 2 weeks of severe insomnia
  • 2 nights of complete sleeplessness (the first in nearly a decade)
  • 70 lb cumulative weight loss
  • 100 lb cumulative weight gain
  • 30 lb net weight gain
  • 4 diagnosed chronic diseases
  • highest recorded blood pressure: 158/110
  • highest recorded blood sugar: 354

Pets

  • 5 total fish owned
  • 0 current fish owned
  • 4 total cats owned
  • 3 current cats owned

16 Notes/ Hide

  1. reagank posted this

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