Thesis Draft (Finally) Complete

It took me an awful long time for several reasons, not least of which is getting a lot of experience in teaching and outreach during the degree, but I'm finally done my thesis draft. I'm printing it today and bringing it to school tomorrow morning. My defence will likely be the first week of September.

As requested many months ago by friend and colleague Christian Muise, here's a wordle for my text:


I will post the final version of the thesis after the defence and any resulting revisions are made.

It's no secret that I did not emphasize research during my Masters degree. This will change for my PhD. I love the fact that I have accomplished many goals during the Masters and thus don't need to be distracted from research in the future.

I also love the fact that I will be able to work on projects I am much more interested in. I learned during the Masters that I don't really love working on the purely experimental side of things. I enjoyed the theoretical portions of my project, but while testing the image matching implementations, I just kept thinking, 'darn, there are so many cool applications of this, and I won't get to any of them!' When I switch my focus to augmented reality, I want to look into using it for educational entertainment. The focus on people and interesting applications this will have excites me!

By the way, I also had a low point or two (as most grad students seem to have) while getting through this thesis. I plan to make a post about impostor syndrome and all that once I figure out how to capture my feelings.