Chan's Personal Blog

So, today I defended my master's project by presenting my work and answering questions from a panel of professors, and I have passed. This marks the end of the academic journey that has spanned 6 years and 5 months.

The first thing one of my co-workers said to me after the defence was how calm and collected I seemed while giving the presentation. Honestly, I was fairly calm because I had already done a practice run of my presentation on Friday, and I had to hardly tweek it. In addition, all grad students in my program have to go through a course on giving presentations, and I was the top presenter, so I wasn't too worried.

I remember talking to Mr. Teel who had finished his masters last year, and he said that he wasn't nervous at all when he had to defend his thesis. He said that the hard part is getting the document written and getting it successfully reviewed by professors. The defence itself is pretty straightforward because you're the expert of that subject. Looking back at it, I would agree with his statements.

The part that I was most worried about was the questions afterwards because the professors would have questions about my project, and three courses that I had taken during graduate studies. It's pretty hard to study for three courses especially if you have no idea what would be asked ahead of time. Thankfully, the questions were mostly about my project (which I'm an expert in), and there were just a handful of questions about my courses. Needless to say, I overstudied by a long shot this time.

One of the professors spent most of his time inquiring about how easy it would be to add certain features because he wanted to use my software for the university. So, this is a good sign because it means he was rather impressed by my implementation, and he could see other uses for it.

The one course that the professors did ask a lot of questions about was on open source software engineering, since my supervisor taught me that course. There was a lot of discussion around that because all of the professors thought that this was an interesting topic. At times, they were debating with each other which is good, because that runs the clock down, and it means less questions for me.

Overall, I think there were two or three questions that I didn't know the answer to, but that was okay. One of the questions that the professor gave didn't make a lot of sense to me, and when he gave the answer, I realized that the answer he gave was wrong. However, the master's defence survival guide says not to argue with a professor even if they're wrong; choose your battles to fight.

After the professors finished with their questioning, everyone was asked to leave the room while the professors discussed whether my work was significant enough to be awarded a Master's degree. They took about 15 minutes to talk it through. Then, the door opened, and the three professors came out bearing congratulations and handshakes. They also informed me that I didn't need to make any revisions to my technical project report, so I am completely done.

All in all, the professors were rather impressed by my technical project. As mentioned before, one of them is interested in adopting the software for other uses at the university, so there's some potential there.

Anyway, I'm very glad that it's over. It still hasn't quite sunk in yet, but I'm sure I'll be more excited later. All that I'm thinking about right now is getting some decent sleep because I have been staying up pretty late studying for the last few nights. But just think.... tomorrow, no more studying! And the day after..... no more studying! This is going to take some getting used to

So, that's another set of acronyms that I can tack onto my name.

Mr. Chan, MSc. BSc.

Looks pretty snazzy.

Well, it's 12 hours before my Master's Defence. Honestly, I thought I'd be much more nervous on the night before the big op, but I'm fairly calm. Really, I just want to get this thing over with because I've been studying for the last 5 days straight.

The checklist for tomorrow morning is to go over my notes and presentation one more time, read over the thesis once more, get dressed up, get psyched up, and into battle we go.

Here's a speech by Adama that will set the tone for tomorrow as I prepare for end.

This one goes out to all of my friends, family, and the Lord for supporting me through this long and arduous journey. Special shout out goes to Myron as he couldn't make it to the defence because of a turn of events.

It's on.

I have finally confirmed a date for my Master's defence. It is scheduled for February 20th, 2007. This marks the final step before ascending to the title of master. Just to make things more epic, I made this movie trailer for my defence. Time well wasted


So, I have ten days to prepare for this defence, so things are going to be fairly crazy. If blog updates or e-mail responses seem tardy, you'll know exactly why.

[Updated]. Random thought #1. It's quite challenging trying to condense a 90 page master's project down to 15-20 slides for a presentation, and having only 20 minutes to present all of the material.