Keep your fingers crossed

Well I'm almost there. Tomorrow is the day I defend my thesis in front of the entire department. Damn the last month went by quickly. I'm pretty nervous but I think I'll be ok. I've practiced the entire talk twice today and I think it's good. The only bad thing is that it's running about 40 minutes, which is ~10 minutes too long. After this last time of practicing I deleted a couple of slides so I'm moving in the right direction, but I still think it'll be long. Oh well.

I had my visit at Northwestern this past Tuesday. I think it went really well. I'm hoping to get an offer by the end of next week, but of course that's not a done deal yet. I realize that no matter where I go I'll be doing some sort of low temp aqueous geochemistry, which is a little scary because I have no experience in it, but it seems that every new thing I try I end up enjoying. I do have a little experience with the tracers I'm using for my MS thesis, which is really what drew me into the topic in the first place. I'm really hoping to get into NU. It's grad program, although extremely tough, is devoted to research and only has like 10-15 grad students at any one time. There is a lot of pressure to research and publish, which may or may not be good, but I figure it's time to learn how to become a good researcher. I figure I already know how to be a good student, or at least succeed as one.

Other than that I really haven't had time to keep up with the news or anything else. I'm just wasting time right now so my voice can recover from talking for over an hour, and so I still have a voice for tomorrow. That's it for now