shankar2k's Journal: Master's Degree!

From Chris Rock's "Bring the Pain"

"Hey guess what, I got my Master's!"

"So what b*tch! Ya punk*ss b*tch! Don't come roun' hea wit all dat readin' an' sh*t! Don't come roun' hea wit all dat countin', I can count too, one two fo five, so what! Countin' dese rocks biotch!"

[To another person] "Yeah I just got my Master's degree!"

"Oh watchu my Master now, we 'sposed ta listen to yo punk*ss, f*ck you n*gga! So watchu gotta motherf*ckin Master's degree! So watchu gotta motherf*ckin Master's degree! Oh, you da smarty-art n*gga, you da smarty-art n*gga, lemme aks ya dis, lemme aks ya dis: Can ya kick my ass?!"

As alluded to by my previous Delusion entry, and the quote above, I just received word that my Master's thesis, entitled "Robust Extensions to Generalized Principal Component Analysis", was accepted! After three-and-a-half grueling years, seven semesters total, I managed to pull it together and crank out a 67-page paper that no one will read, that I did to get a couple of four-inch signatures. It took me quite a while to get started with it, because I honestly didn't have the first clue about grad school or doing research. When I finally got around to it, I was amazed at how much I already knew. But then I hit another snag, as I kept worrying that my research wasn't good enough. Eventually, I decided to just overcompensate, by putting more than enough material in there so I wouldn't have to worry about it. So in the end, my thesis contains material from roughly two-and-a-half conference papers that we have submitted for publication. Here are some random thoughts about the thesis:

• Honestly, I'm a bit more proud of the conference papers my group submitted than the thesis. In those papers, we had one message that we were trying to sell, but in my thesis I have, well, two-and-a-half.
• LaTeX (pronounced Luh-Tech or Lah-Tech), the software I used to write my thesis, is awesome! It definitely is not for the faint of heart, as it has a fairly high learning curve. LaTeX automatically generates a table of contents, list of figures, and references at the end. The end result looks pretty polished and professional.
• The people in the ECE Publication office are a bunch of nazis if you ask me. I had to resubmit my thesis to them three times before they finally gave their stamp of approval. Some of their recommendations, such as grammatical mistakes, typos, and the references being hard to read, are reasonable and I used the powers of LaTeX to quickly fix most of them. But when they say things like, "The word 'Chapter' at the beginning of each chapter should be capitalized", or, "The font in the list of figures should be the exact same size as the rest of the test", they just drove me up the wall. Those people are killing the rainforest with their excessive stylistic corrections. The only good thing about suffering through that is the format check in the Graduate College was a breeze.
• It came to me in a flash at some point during this semester ... I (sort of) know how to do research now. It blows my mind that I've managed to learn something in graduate school after being so clueless initially. That's exactly what a Master's thesis is supposed to teach you though.
• As a result, I no longer have doubts about my abilities to get a PhD. Even after I passed the Qualifying Exam, I was worried because getting a good score on a test like that doesn't mean you can do research. It's no longer a question of "Can I do it?", it's only a matter of time.
• Because it took me so long to get started, I felt very rushed working on the thesis, and that didn't feel good at all. Now I'm not so afraid of starting big projects like this, so I won't have to rush. So for my PhD, I'm going to do it on my own time. I'll graduate when I graduate, when I feel I'm ready.

Ok, that's enough for now. Now my winter break can finally start!

Re:Congratulations!

[shankar2k]

Thanks!