I’m about to earn that title of FL Doctor….  This Thursday, I will face my committee for the final oral defense of my dissertation, and, if I pass, I will then get to pretentiously make my friends call me “doctor.”

Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeettttttt!!!!!!

For those who don’t understand the whole PhD process, basically they tend to follow some variant of the following script (note: there are individual differences in schools and departments, but the following was my experience):

1) Lots of grad classes — this can take 2-4 years, on average

2) After one finishes coursework, one has a comprehensive exam, supposedly testing all of your knowledge acquired from graduate coursework. In my department, this took the form of a written exam (50+ pages answering 4 questions, written in the space of one week), followed by an oral exam, which mainly retrod the domain of the written exam.

3) After the comprehensive exam, one has 6 months in which to form a dissertation committee and to make a formal dissertation proposal.   The proposal is made at a public forum.

4) Once the proposal is accepted, depending upon the nature of the research project, one may have to apply for formal permission from local/state/national regulatory bodies or institutions in order to legally conduct said research.  This can take a while…

5) Conduct research.  This can take a loooooooooooong while (depending upon the type of research)…

6) Analyze data

7) Write up dissertation.  This can take a long while or a short while (depending upon focus and attitudes towards writing)…

8 ) Once one has a working dissertation, one can negotiate a defense date with one’s committee.  If, like mine, your committee is composed of some of the  busiest people on the planet, expect some wait time here…

9) Defense: essentially, this is an oral presentation of the dissertation research in a public forum, followed by a private grilling by your committee.  The severity of the interrogation can range from polite inquiry to Jack Bauer-esque activity which would fall afoul of Geneva Conventions, but is largely dependent upon the makeup of your committee.  Keep in mind: they don’t call it a “defense” for nothing…

10) Revisions: in every university’s graduate handbook, they will list at least three possible outcomes for your defense.  The first is an immediate pass, wherein the entire dissertation is taken as-is and published immediately.  This is basically a mythological beast like a hydra or a minotaur.  Everybody’s heard of it, but no one’s ever seen one, and one seriously doubts that it ever existed.  The more likely outcome of a defense is a conditional pass, wherein you pass, but have to make some revisions to the dissertation before the committee will sign off on it.  This is still a pass, and is accompanied by much revelry by the graduate student.  The other outcome is practically a “he-that-shall-not-be-named” on-campus.  This is a “fail,” and, depending on the university/department, the severity of a fail can either be immediate expulsion from the department, or simply having to spend another year or so revising the dissertation (or possibly rehashing the entire research project) before taking another go at it.

11) Graduation!  Woohoo!

Anyway, all of that to say that I will be reaching step #9 this Thursday.  Wish me luck!

p.s., I must confess that I felt a little strange when someone referred to my dissertation as “the culmination of my life’s work.”  If it were truly the culmination of my life’s work, I would suspect it would be substantially longer, wouldn’t it????  (The fact is, my Master’s Thesis was about 50% longer…)

“Google”

Seriously….

Not the normal content for this site, as this is more of a 1st language acquisition issue, but still interesting…

Children are reaching the age of 3 without being able to say a word, according to a survey that also found boys are almost twice as likely to struggle to learn to speak as girls.

The average age for a baby to speak their first word is 10 to 11 months. However, a significant minority (4 per cent) of parents reported that their child said nothing until they were 3.

While this is the extreme minority of children, and even late talkers can “catch up” and become well-adjusted average (or well-above average) children later, it still is well worth pointing out.  All to many parents I’ve seen are much too eager to advocate for their children’s language ability, interpreting grunts and gurgles as words in an attempt to deny any language development delays.  I would plead with parents to be honest in their assessments.  Don’t panic overly if the child is not talking by age 1 — that’s an average, but a child waiting a couple months to utter the first word is not of the ordinary, however if they haven’t learned quite a 50+ words and started making 2-3 word utterances by age 2, seek language development therapy for your children…

May the year be better than the movie (which totally failed to live up to 2001)…