This morning I presented my Thesis Proposal Defense. For those that are unfamiliar with these, in the Master's program here you write a Thesis Proposal document before doing your actual thesis work. These documents are generally about 20 pages, mine is 22. Once your advisor and your 2nd committee member approve the document you schedule your defense and give the document to the 3rd committee member. So after much difficulty getting a hold of all of my committee members we finally got it scheduled for today.

The Defense is a presentation which is supposed to be targeted towards an audience which is less familiar with your specific field of research, so generally a little more high level and only touch on the details unless the audience members ask questions. Being a common occurrence most Proposal Defenses usually just have the 3 members of your actual committee, and maybe some friends or co-workers.

I, "fortunately", was able to pique the interest of two more faculty members either because they were genuinely interested, or perhaps just bored since we're between semesters. Either way, they showed up and were ready to dive right in. Normally you spend about 15 minutes on the presentation and then maybe answer 5 minutes worth of questions. I wasn't quite so lucky. My research draws from a number of broad areas each of which I could have spent 15 minutes on discussing it; so in preparing my presentation (and the proposal document itself) I had to pick and choose what to talk about. I was about halfway through my presentation when some of the faculty members started asking some questions, so I took some time to answer those; probably an extra 5-7 minutes worth. Then once I finished we spent probably a good extra 20-25 minutes with questions. Fortunately, I was well prepared and had done an incredible amount of reading that didn't even make it into my bibliography because I already had more than the expected amount. The 2" binder of papers I read is sitting on my floor right now filled completely and doesn't include papers I only read on the computer and decided weren't important enough to print out. So I felt rather confident in my knowledge about things even if that breadth and depth wasn't immediately apparent in the presentation. So I was able to address each of their questions with satisfactory and complete answers.

I was starting to feel a little harassed though, since I hadn't seen this level of "assault" in any of the defenses I had attended. I did get some good feedback of how I can structure my presentation in the future (for my actual Thesis Defense) to allay some of these confusions and questions; so that was good. I just hadn't thought of that arrangement beforehand. So I survived the "attacks" without needing my advisor to defend me, which happens some times for students.

After the public was dismissed I was glad to be held for an extra moment just to be told I had done a good job of answering all the questions, so that felt good. I picked my committee members because I value and respect their judgments and opinions, so to have them directly tell me that they felt I had handled things well helped take away some of the stress. I was dismissed to give them a moment to talk things over and was then brought back in for handshakes and congratulations.

I had passed.

They signed all the paper work and then it was official. So that feels good to be done with. And, it means my pay goes up by a dollar an hour. Not too exciting, but that does translate into an extra $80 a month, which will be nice.

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