Research

It’s a strange thing to finish a thesis. You came in to grad school hoping, maybe even expecting, to make a grand contribution—a deep insight into the nature of the world. But Borges puts it best:

…the tall, haughty volumes that made a golden dimness in the corner of his room were not (as his vanity had dreamed them) a mirror of the world, but just another thing added to the world’s contents.

—Jorge Luis Borges, “The Yellow Rose,” Andrew Hurley’s translation

For that matter, when do you really “finish”? The dissertation is pretty much written — then a few weeks later the slides are ready — then the defense itself takes place — then you make revisions — then there’s a graduation ceremony — and even then, there remain a few minor “suggested” revisions I haven’t done yet but should do before getting it printed & bound & archived. [That finally happened half a year later, over January break, long after the PhD was “over.”]

Not to mention, my status felt weirdly ambiguous. The faculty at Colby have already hired me and seem to treat me as basically a colleague, pending the minor formality of defending. And at CMU I’m also teaching a course and students are calling me “Professor.” But of course, everyone else in the department is used to treating me as a student, so I feel very much like one. Admittedly, during the few weeks when I was no longer a “PhD Candidate” but not yet officially “Dr Wieczorek,” I enjoyed the brief chance to introduce myself as a “Graduand” 🙂

But it’s all very anticlimactic! There’s no trumpet fanfare saying: “NOW you are done.” If anything, it felt like the first Zelda game’s end music (starting about 20 sec into the clip below):

As you’ve played the game through, you’ve died many many times along the way, and Link’s death lullaby has been playing so long in all your lowest moments that you don’t even really hear it anymore. Then here it returns, after you thought you were done. Not this again?!? Yet suddenly your ears catch a faint counterpoint that wasn’t there before. This new bass line changes the character of the music completely, getting stronger and stronger, until somehow it has become a jazzy, celebratory tune. There’s no one moment of enlightenment, but a weary transition as the world slowly starts looking better and better.

Teaching

While I didn’t finish as much of the thesis last fall as I expected, it was supposed to be my focus this spring (along with the new baby!), with only minimal grading responsibilities as a TA.

HOWEVER… a week before spring term started, a last-minute shift in staffing became necessary and I was asked to teach 36-315, Statistical Graphics and Visualization—a hundred-student undergraduate class. I really should have said No (the chair told me it’s okay to say No!), but still, the department seemed to be at a loss, and I didn’t want to let them down after all they had done for me throughout my time at CMU. So instead, I found myself focused on teaching the largest class I’ve had yet, while just scraping by on both research and parenting.

Teaching this class was a valuable experience in and of itself, and you know I LOVE teaching data visualization, but—argh!

This spring I also finished the last requirement for the Eberly Center’s Future Faculty Program. It was a bit funny to have to revise my Statement of Teaching Philosophy several times, given that I’d already written one that got me a job, but it does feel good to wrap this up formally. The program made a big impact on my teaching over the past few years, and I’m glad I can contribute to their completion rate.

Other projects

We continued our Teaching Statistics research, running many more think-aloud interviews, and presented our work at eCOTS 2018 (the Electronic Conference on Teaching Statistics).

I also traveled back to DC, to the Census Bureau, to give a talk on my paper with Tommy Wright and Martin Klein. The paper is about visualizations designed to help readers make many comparisons in a statistically-appropriate way. The talk was recorded, and now I see the video has been posted as part of a new “Census Academy” resource.

Life

The baby went through a rough patch where he wouldn’t fall sleep unless someone was holding him and moving around—sitting wasn’t good enough. Somehow I discovered that I could hold him while playing Crypt of the NecroDancer, which is basically a mashup of Dance Dance Revolution and Legend of Zelda: you use the arrow keys to move your dungeon-explorer in time with the beat of this amazing techo-ish soundtrack. I would play with one hand, standing and rocking back and forth to help myself stick to the beat, and the little guy would just fall asleep contentedly while I repeatedly ~~destroyed~~ got killed by skeletons and slime monsters.

Despite everyone’s sensible advice, we went house-hunting in Maine in mid-March—when all the houses were covered in 3 feet of snow—because spring break was the only time I could get away. Surprisingly, nobody else was house-hunting there that week 🙂 and as it turned out, we found a wonderful home at a very reasonable price. Our landlord in Pittsburgh has been wonderful, but we’re excited to become homeowners.

Comics

So, at this point you might be wondering: Is a PhD degree in Statistics worthwhile?

Someday I’ll follow up with a post on that, akin to my MS degree post. Meanwhile, Matt Might has the best post on the value of a PhD in general.

But for today, I will leave you with some comics that kept me ~~crying~~ smiling during the tough times of a PhD. Of course, PHD Comics (aka Piled Higher and Deeper) and XKCD both go without saying, but here are a few others that felt relevant.

When you’re starting down this precarious road: