D-Day: December 12, 2007

A day that will forever live in infamy… At 1:00 pm on December 12, 2007, I’ll orally defend (“D-day” as in “defense”) my preliminary thesis proposal. This is described as being the most difficult aspect of the Ph.D. process and will likely last nearly 2 hours, consisting of a brief introductory presentation by me, followed by lines of questioning about the subject and related subjects until they “feel I’m done” (or dead). The committee got together today to say that the 25-page document I turned in is “sufficient” and we can move ahead with the oral defense, and they set the date as next Wednesday.

I’ve been surprisingly good over these past few weeks with studying my old flash cards and review articles on the subjects of Parkinson disease, oxidative stress, the mitochondria and apoptosis (amongst others). I’m going to take a few days off between now and then to buckle down a few facets of the thesis proposal, as each committee member gave me a brief page with a few “suggestions” for things to think about. These are things they may ask about during the oral defense, but maybe not. Regardless, they thought everything was explained relatively well, but had a few questions on why I picked some experiments over others, or some time points over others, etc.

I feel pretty good right now about the whole thing, but I imagine that my feelings will change as we get closer. If I fail it (which does happen…), then I’ll get the opportunity to do it again…but I’m hoping it doesn’t come to that (obviously). Getting this all done before the Christmas holiday would be a big plus…

Here we go!