"BIG" Personal Goals For The Year 2008: An update (1)

I have completed the following two of my "Big" goals:

1) Passed my PhD qualifying exam (PQE)
2) Published the pan-DENV paper

First, I am going to talk about the PhD qualifying exam. I am happy that the university has this system in place to help graduate students like me assess our work done so far and ask ourselves how do they fit with the big picture or the theme of our thesis. Another advantage is that preparing for the PQE helps you prepare the framework for your thesis. The PQE proposal is already like a mini thesis, containing:

1. Executive summary
2. Motivation and significance
3. Aims
4. Methodology
5. Extension of the research work
6. Summary of significant published data
7. Current achievements
8. Funding
9. References

All this is further complemented by the presentation slides that one has to prepare for the actual day. Now with all these available to me (proposal + slides + comments from examiners), writing the thesis should not be that difficult.

On the actual presentation day, apart from one examiner coming late and the projector power menu occasionally flashing "on" and "off" on the screen, everything else went well. Each of the three examiners had many questions to ask, I managed to answer most of them, dodged some and for some I could not provide satisfactory answers. Taken together, the examiners were pleased and approved my conversion to PhD candidate ;)

Now coming to the paper. Finally, after two years of working on the paper, it has been accepted and will be published in one to two months time. I am glad that it is over, and now I can move on to make new discoveries!