Defended…continued

Well, finally I got to blog for about a month…so many interesting things have happened in the world around me! More on this in my later blog posts.

Anyways, here are the details of my Master’s thesis presentation…

2 days to go:

Converted all my diagrams in openoffice into a powerpoint, which made it easier for my advisor to make minor changes to my schematics. Worked wonderfully well, except that it doesn’t work really that well the other way around ( i mean opening a powerpoint in OpenOffice) ! Sent off my draft of my presentation to my advisor. After going over it with him, I came back with a bunch of about 50 changes to make. Phew…

The day before my presentation:

Made most of the changes for the presentation. Then, I started practising my presentation. It was kind of weird, cause I haven’t done any kind of public speaking ever since I left India (or more specifically, after Helix). After about 3 mocks with Sunil (a Phd Student in my lab), and a bunch of reorganising the powerpoint to make more sense, it was mostly ready. I also had to add a few more 3-D models to my presentation to make clear what I was trying to achieve here! I finished off most of my work at about 12 hours before the presentation. Then went to get my clothes ready. Slept at about 3:00 am with my presentation scheduled at 10:30 am in the morning.

The day: August 10th

Got up at about 8:30 am. Just 2 hours before. Then, went and met my advisor to make any last minute changes and to let him know of the changes Sunil and I made. We made a few minor changes, and that’s about it…we were all set (at about 10:00 am).

The members on my comittee arrived about 5 minutes before, and also the surgeon from UT SouthWestern. Then, at about 10:35 or so, I introduced myself and started talking.

Well, my presentation went on for about 1 hour and 15 minutes. During the presentation, the surgeon asked the most questions, and also gave the most suggestions. ( and very important, I should say… what we prototype will be evalutated by surgeons!!). I managed to address most of the issues pointed out with my design to the surgeon (and the rest of my commitee), and I was quite surprised that one of my committee members actually said that he doesn’t care about the math, and that I should address most of the issues raised by the surgeon! There was a nice buzz about what I had worked on, and everyone was really enthusiastic with my work!! That probably explains the lack of difficult questions at the end (although, I had gone over a string of questions with Sunil the day before! ). They also recommended that we patent our work. We were also invited to UTSW to give a talk on the same!

So, it ended off great, and looks like my work has laid a good foundation to future research!! It’s good to know that you are doing some pioneering work (from one of the members of the committee) !!

Finally, they recommended to add in a lot of documenting, and the surgeon also offered to help in this process! I am going to complete the documentation process in the Fall Semester( hope to finish in about a month or so). And after I do that, my Master’s program would have been completed, and I will be done.