More Time..Less Stress

I was able to get my start date pushed back to July 20 and they said it would even be fine if I need longer. I said a week at the most. This works out perfect for me since my lease is up the beginning of August anyway and it basically give me another month to organize my thesis.

My work has been going quite well, ever since I stumbled upon that idea of reducing the jumps size. I have been able to run tests to diagnose the problems that were occurring earlier. I am varying the parameter slightly to see how the procedure reacts.

I have now spoken with all my committee members and they are all on board with my plans to defend this summer. The only issue now is finding a date that fits within everyone's schedule. Several professors have suggested being out of town for several weeks over the summer; so as a statistician I should probably calculate the probability that they will all be in town at the same time. Right now, I am thinking July 17 sounds good. My adviser will be back from France even though he said he could also do it via skype.

Apparently my thesis has been making it rounds around campus. My brother told me yesterday one of his students got a copy of it from the finance department and another graduate students in the statistics department is reading a copy to start his own research. I told him I will help catch him up to speed on my work over the summer and I am actually pleased that someone in our department will continue pursuing this line of work. There are many areas in the particle filter, smoothing literature that I just wont have time to explore but would no doubt yield a dissertation for someone willing to pursue it. There are also many applications in finance and economics that I see.

It's encouraging in the sense that currently I am the only graduate student in the department working in this area. Hopefully I have started some spark that will grow, and hope is that I can still do some collaboration with the other graduate student while I'm in S. Florida and perhaps get a paper out. It's not that I haven't tried to market my work before; however the graduate students I talked to either had areas of research or simply just didn't have the skills necessary to do the work. But this guy seems like he's willing to put in the work necessary to understand whats going on.

I won't go into details, but one lesson I learned yesterday from watching a colleagues essay defense. Never ever...ever put stuff on you slides that you are not prepared to defend.

I had my last class yesterday, after 3 years it feel like I'm leaving at the right time.