The end of my time in graduate school at UCLA is fast approaching. On December 10, 2008 I will present a defense of my thesis to my committee. The Physics Department holds closed defenses, meaning that only the committee is allowed in the room. Some departments have open defenses in which guests and other interested people are allowed to observe (I have even heard of some departments requiring two defenses in which the first is closed and tough while the second one is open and friendly). It is a mad dash to the finish because I have to provide the committee with copies of the thesis right after the APS conference. Once it is finished, I will post a PDF of it on this website and also provide an HTML version to replace this.

A Sign that it is Time to Graduate

I recently received an accidental hint that it is time for me to finish school. A few weeks ago my department email mysteriously stopped working. Outages happen infrequently, so I let it go for a day and a half to see whether it would itself out. If the system goes down on a Sunday there is no point filing a help ticket with the department's IT group because odds are that they will see it when the come in to work on Monday. In this case, however, the problem never resolved itself and I submitted a help request. Help arrived immediately.

The department's email system automatically assigns accounts a six year lifetime. My six years passed and the system simply turned off my account! The IT group logged in to their system, probably checked a box labeled “Activate”, and I was back online. Everyone in the lab had a good time joshing me about running out my email lifetime. My account returned to full functionality, allowing me to receive the following image from another graduate student.

Now it's time to get back to work.