EGU Blogs

My DEFENCE! Follow live tweets with #129I @ 2:30pm ET

My PhD defence is this week (Wednesday) at 2:30pm ET. I am feeling pretty good about the whole thing but at the same time nervous. I just don’t know exactly what to expect. I have a sort of idea of what the questions might cover and where my assumptions or conclusions might be challenged. However, the uncertainty of all this is what is making me nervous.

Credit: XKCD

I have gotten lots of good advice from people such as “you are the real expert on the material” and “be confident and prepare a great talk”. All of this is great advice, however it doesn’t really help assuage the feeling that this is the most important talk I have ever given and the nerves that accompany that. Furthermore, despite the fact that I am now an expert on 129I I still have to convince four very smart people that I what I did was worthwhile and good science.

As far as my preparations go I have read lots of articles from fellow bloggers about how to prepare and what to think about and talked to postdocs in the lab. These have all been very helpful things to do, but at the end of the day I know that I will be the one standing at the front of the room and facing the steely gaze of the examiners (not really, they are all nice people). I have read over my thesis several times, prepared a list of possible questions, re-read key articles and reviewed the basic principles of the models I used and the statistical tests. I still feel unprepared and I doubt that feeling will go away until I start my talk. Plus, thesis committees are still scary!

Credit: PhD Comics

Anyway, in the interest of distracting myself yet also being sort of productive I am preparing to live-tweet my defence. I am pre-scheduling about 20-30 tweets for the time during my talk so you can view these key points of my thesis as I talk about them at uOttawa. Follow the feed with #129I. Interact with the tweets, ask questions, etc. I won’t get to them until later in the day…or maybe the next day, but I will eventually.

Wish me luck and remember, follow #129I!!!! Tweets start at 2:30pm ET.

Also, I’m using a new presentation program called SlideDog. I mean why not try something new for the most important talk of my life. Stay tuned for this:

Credit: PhD Comics

Matt Herod is a Ph.D Candidate in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Ottawa in Ontario, Canada. His research focuses on the geochemistry of iodine and the radioactive isotope iodine-129. His work involves characterizing the cycle and sources of 129I in the Canadian Arctic and applying this to long term radioactive waste disposal and the effect of Fukushima fallout. His project includes field work and lab work at the André E. Lalonde 3MV AMS Laboratory. Matt blogs about any topic in geology that interests him, and attempts to make these topics understandable to everyone. Tweets as @GeoHerod.


1 Comment

  1. Good luck! I just took a petrology midterm today and a whole page was over isotopes. I’m more of a soft rock kind of guy.

Comments are now closed for this post.