Happy Halloween and Happy Melissa’s Proposal Defense Day!
Today I defended my PhD Proposal ‘WHEN YOU PLAY THE GAME OF DRONES, YOU WIN OR YOU DIE: EXAMINING THE ROLE OF DRONES IN U.S. AND ENGLISH LANGUAGE ALLIES NEWSPAPER MEDIA FROM 2008-2018’ and it was accepted!!! Doesn’t it have a wonderful title? Please note the drone shirt. I was a drone bee for Halloween and my defense, with a bee shirt, socks, and bee earnings. No one got it. Sigh. I had to explain. I tired to incorporate the bee/drone/Halloween items into my presentation. I also brought candy – as its Halloween!
So the weather was terrible (rain, gray, and humid) all day, but my proposal defense went great. I talked for about 25-30 minutes with my awesome slides! Then I was asked questions about drones by my committee, and then I was asked to go outside to “await my fate.” A few minutes later I went back in and passed!!! This was so exciting. This means that I can now really start the research on my PhD paper. A few things to think about and perhaps fix – 1) my timeline for a May graduation is a bit too ambitious, so summer might be better. And my committee was interested in how I was going to do the data minding and they feel that I should expand on that. So that’s cool and I will see what I can do. Thank you to my awesome committee Dr St. Marie, Dr. Pauly, Dr. Wigginton, and Dr. Lansford (Dr. Lansford was not able to be there but he was there via phone) and a million thank yous to Annette for setting things up, getting things signed for graduation, handling the paperwork, etc. The people in the IDV Department and at USM have always been wonderful and so helpful. They are good people who want their students to succeed.
After I was done with the defense I was off to the airport, where my flight was delayed due to weather in Atlanta, by 25 minutes. Which was not good, by the time I left Gulfport and got to Atlanta my next flight was already boarding. As we tried to get off, the gate was not working and we could not get off the plane for about 5-10 minutes. Finally we were free, but now about 10 or so of us had to race across the Atlanta airport from section C to A, which means running to the shuttle, running up the moving stairs, running again at A to find the flight. I hate running. I really HATE having to run across an airport with a heavy backpack and purse. It was insane. Eventually we got on the airplane and I was asleep before it took off. In Minnesota it was cold, in the 30s and dry, none of this Mississippi humidity. I will take snow over humidity any day.