Dissertation Defense

Last week I successfully defended my Ph.D. I'm so excited and happy about it. It was a long journey and took 7 years for me to graduate from University at Albany. I had to change my advisor so it makes it hard for me to finish it sooner. But anyway, now it's done. My dissertation still needs some correction and after its submission, I'll be officially graduated. 

The defense session went pretty well. I was prepared for it despite having some minor last-minute changes. I had some notes in my slides that helped me to narrate fluently in complex concepts. My timing was perfect and I could finish the presentation in 45 minutes. Then I could answer the committees' questions. Some of them were legit errors in the work and some of the defects that I was worry about were ignored by them. But overall, they were satisfied and accepted the thesis.

FLAIRS-33 Notification for paper; Accepted!

Today I got an email with the subject "FLAIRS-33 notification for paper 201" and it is fortunate that my submitted paper to this conference has been accepted as a full paper. I'm very happy that the paper is accepted. This paper is a part of my dissertation which is very fundamental and the rest of the work is based on it. I am very delightful since I had done a lot of work on this paper and submitted it last minute. Even I can say that it was submitted after the deadline by my advisor so I was thinking maybe it is not considered. I was expecting to get the notification email earlier and very nervous that it might get rejected.

The conference will be held in Miami in May which is a week before my anticipated graduation date. It is going to be fascinating if everything happens as planned.