Today turned out to be a monumental day for Dave. Let me give you a little background.
Dave just started his 12th year of college. Yes, his 12th consecutive year of college. He has his Bachelor’s Degree and his Master’s Degree in Electrical Engineering and is currently working to finish his Ph.D. He does research with lasers and earning a Ph.D doing research can take a long time. Experiments don’t work as you thought they were going to, parts of the experiment break and take a while to replace, multiple people use the same equipment in different ways which makes the time available to do your own experiment is limited and a number of other things can happen which prolong the progress of results and, ultimately, graduation for many students. It’s not like you just follow X, Y, Z steps and spend X number of hours in the lab and you’re done. You actually have to get results and contribute to scientific knowledge to get that Ph.D. And that can take a while. Say, 12 years or more?
Dave’s Laser System
Dave was told that in order to graduate her needed to help finish building a new laser system, successfully complete four more experiments on the new system, write his dissertation and defend it… and then he’s done!
Today Dave was successful in getting results in the first of the four experiments he needs to complete to graduate! That means we are one small step closer to his graduation, his finding a job, us buying a home, having kids, and so on and so on and so on. It’s a small step but a significant one.
Congratulations, Dave! Keep up the good work!
Oh my gosh. I can relate to this post so much!! It's so frustrating not having an end date in sight. Jeremy is still working on his first publication and we're in year three. :(
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