I defended my dissertation proposal today.

What this means is that I now have an approved (by my dissertation advisory committee) framework for the research that will grant me my Ph.D.

There were no bad surprises that caught me or my adviser off guard. My advisory committee members are really great people, and we were able to discuss what I’m proposing to do very well. They suggested a couple of things, but they were ideas that me and my advisor had been discussing ourselves only recently, so even that wasn’t out of the blue for us. Although—to an extent we were, or at least I was, thinking of doing those things for different reasons than what the committee suggested. That’s the thing with these defenses—you get a different perspective on what you look at everyday.

Well, one more step completed. This was on the calendar for quite a long time, and it’s nice to get this done. :)

On the other hand, this is the beginnning of the next, arduous path—now that I’ve proposed something, I’ve to actually go ahead and do those things! Lots of experiments to do; many lines of MATLAB code to write and debug—fun times are ahead!

But for now—a bit of a break. Well earned, if I do say so myself. :)

So, I’ve defended my Ph.D. Preliminary Exam (phew), and what lies ahead are the defense of my thesis proposal, and the final Ph.D. Dissertation Defense, of course.

Does this mean I can now call myself a ‘Ph.D. Candidate’, as opposed to a Ph.D. student? Is there a difference in connotation? I’m not really sure about the protocols involved.

If you happen to know the norms (or lack of them), leave a comment, will you?