Officially Advanced

Something like 6 months ago, my advisor told me I'm ready to advance to Ph.D. candidacy, and I could finish doing it in a week or two, and hopefully we could get it out of the way by the end of the (spring '07) quarter.

Two weeks back I finally asked him when we're going to get around to organizing my advancement to candidacy. In two day's time it was organized and the date was set. Yesterday, I got to stand before a room of 5 professors and give an hour long powerpoint presentation demonstrating a knowledge of the entire field of cosmology, as we know it today, and what I have been researching, in particular, and how this research fits in to the current model, and what I should be focusing on in the future.

I knew I would be fine. I mean, sure I made some mistakes, and felt a little like a deer staring into the headlights of an oncoming truck, but I managed to gather myself together after James would come to my aid with a helpful question to get me pointed in the right direction. Mostly it was the anticipation that was killing me. I was probably more nervous about giving the talk about an hour beforehand than when I was giving the presentation, itself.

But not it's over. I am officially (well... the paperwork is still making its way through the UC system, so more like essentially than officially) advanced to Ph.D. candidacy. What does this mean you might ask? Well, it means that I have taken essentially the only real stepping stone between the qualifying examination and my final Ph.D. thesis defense. One might say it signifies me reaching the "halfway point" between the quals, where essentially you finish classes and begin research, and receiving my Ph.D, where my research at UCI is complete and I go out into the world in search of post-docs.

In short, it's a sort of rite of passage (though nothing nearly so severe as the quals) that I've completed. And it feels pretty good to have done so. Now if those two papers I'm first and second author on, respectively, would just get published already. The research has been essentially done and we've been tinkering with perfecting them for about 6 months now as well.
One day, there will come a time when someone will ask me "so how's that paper you keep talking about going?" and I'll be able to respond with something other than "it's basically done. Any week now, we'll send it out."