Rob defended on June 16th, last Monday. The presentation went really well. Obviously Rob was nervous, but he's a good presenter, so it went really well. Rob was cute and included a thank you to me as his wife (I'm amazed he even THOUGHT of it), and an entire slide at the end that had pictures of him and me and then all the kids.
Then Rob had that hour with just his committee where they tore everything apart, just for fun. :) It was a little discouraging on Monday, what their feedback was. One of the committee members basically said that Rob needed to re-write the entire thing because it wasn't "professional-sounding".
But through the week as Rob went and talked to each of the committee members one-on-one, it came out what they really wanted. One of the members (not the nasty "professional" lady) said just to revise certain parts of it and not worry so much about an expansive re-write. He said, "I think she meant blah blah blah by what she said." No, not so much. Rob went and talked to her and she meant exactly what she had said. But turns out a lot of her objections were just silly ones and Rob tried to tell her so (in a diplomatic way--my way would have been, "You're a loser. Get over it."). Basically she said she wasn't going to re-read it after the re-write. So when R is happy with the re-write, she'll sign off. And that's taken a LOT of the pressure off.
Rob has extended his start date at Children's. Because the re-write was so expansive, and because Rob is at Scout Camp all this week, it didn't give him a lot of time to make the changes. He said he could have done it in the time he had if I never saw him. Not happening. So he called Dr. J who graciously gave him another 2 weeks. So his new start date at Children's is July 21st. Dr. R wants Rob done at his lab by July 14th (R arranged to pay Rob for the extra time, but wants him out by July 14th), which would give Rob a mandatory vacation with us. :) Happiness! R also said that if Rob needs that extra week, he'll pay him for that week too, so it's pretty stress-free here.
Some of the things we've learned through this process:
1. I don't like Rob getting home every night at 8:00 p.m. for 2 weeks. Yuck. On Thursday as we were nearing the end, I looked at him and said, "Rob, could you think about coming home a little earlier tomorrow? Like 7:00?" He got this look on his face like, "I don't know, that might be really hard." And I almost started crying and yelling all at the same time: "Can you JUST THINK about it?" :) He was home at 6:30 the next night (though not because of me. An advisor was talking to him and said, "I think you're freaking out a little about this defense. Go home to your family." Good woman).
2. It's hard to tell just how stressed out you are until you're no longer that stressed out. :) Tuesday I was driving home from The Beach Waterpark (I made Rob take the day off to play with us--someone gave us free tickets. I thought, "Free tickets the day after Rob defends? That's fate) and I turned on the music. I've been into music lately as a way to tune out. And I realized, as I turned the radio on, that I like music, but I didn't need to tune out any more. Things are good and I'm not stressed past max capacity. And other things happened that week, too. I've been in a state of spiritual apathy lately. I had some issues that I'd resolved no problem, but the apathy remained. I wasn't sure why and I was pretty confused by it, actually. And then on Tuesday it was just gone. Like that. Amazing.
3. As Rob was giving his presentation a few interesting thoughts struck me. First, it's not too hard to see why Rob would have been so stressed about this presentation and defense. He had to take the last 4 years of his life and condense it into a coherent 1-hour presentation. Wow. I thought a lot about that. I mean, what would I present about MY life for the last 4 years? It's an interesting idea. Take the last 4 years of your life and make it a cohesive 1-hour presentation. It made me want to sit down and think about my life the last 4 years. What have I learned? What was disappointing? What didn't happen the way I thought it would, but how did I handle that? What worked just perfectly? Interesting.
And that's the update about Rob's defense.
Rob is not officially Dr. Thacker yet, and I'm not sure when that'll be official. But like it matters. The title is unimportant. Being DONE, though, that's what's important.
Tamra
No comments:
Post a Comment