1 - Off topic, I had my doctoral proposal defense seminar on Thursday, and I'm pleased to report it went quite satisfactorily. If you're wondering what, exactly, a doctoral proposal defense seminar is, it goes something like this: "The defense of the dissertation proposal is a major landmark in a doctoral student's career. The dissertation proposal presents the research questions, hypotheses, or models that are to be examined in the dissertation research, includes a thorough and critical review of the relevant literature, and specifies the methodology that will be used to examine the research questions, hypotheses or models."
I can also report that none of the audience died from boredom, although there were a few glazed eyes towards the end. Needless to say, it was quite a big deal and important to get right because the proposal + defense ordeal is required for me to progress from a mere provisional PhD candidate to a full PhD candidate. In the next week or so, the 'Research Committee' will meet and vote on my candidature, so things will be finalised then. The whole experience completely fried my brain, and despite a 15hr sleep I was still in bad shape for most of yesterday. I'm almost able to type complete sentences today, so perhaps my (marginal at best) speech faculties will return sometime next week....
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