The World Needs More Ninjas

Last week, I cleared one of the final obstacles before graduation, my prelim exam. I’m a little late posting this news since I had to wait until that was finished before setting up this blog. For those of you unfamiliar with the weird world of academia, the prelim (in our department, at least), is where you form a committee of four faculty members and give them about a two hour presentation of what you’ve done and what you plan to do, research-wise, before graduation. They, in turn, give you suggestions of how to refine your dissertation work before your final defense. It definitely feels good to have it over with. Now comes the work of completing everything that needs to be done before graduating and starting a job search (which is a rather grueling process, particularly to try to go into academia).