100% Official

As of yesterday, I have completed all the requirements for my Master's degree. I took my final test of the semester (Statistics) and received confirmation from the graduate school that all my paperwork was in order and that my thesis had been officially accepted.

The graduation ceremony was this past Sunday and I attended but had chosen not to walk, mainly because I'm staying on for my PhD making the ceremony very anti-climactic. I attended the ceremony to see a good friend of mine get his PhD and while waiting for the ceremony to start, I was thumbing through the program. There I was, listed as completed my Master's along with my thesis title. Even for me, a person who doesn't care much for ceremony, this was a little weird. I felt like I should run up on stage and get in line will all the other Master's students. I was literally just a few hundred feet away from being able to participate in the ceremony.

For me now, school will just continue for a while. Classes start up again in mid-January and I'll be attending the normal three lecture classes, just like I have for the past five semesters. Looking at my estimated schedule for the next few years, it doesn't look like things start to change much until spring 2011 when I begin taking my dissertation hours. Each semester from that point on I spend more and more time on my official schedule working on my dissertation until I complete it in the spring of 2013. At least that's how thing stand now; all of this is subject to change and probably this spring I'll be submitting more paperwork to get this schedule of mine officially approved as worthy of PhD work.

There is a hiccup that I already know of in my schedule. The Engineering and Education departments recently got together to form a program specifically geared towards graduate students in engineering who plan on a career in academia, like me. By taking four specific graduate level education classes, I will be able to earn a Certificate in Engineering Education. The problem: the engineering graduate department may not recognize any of those education courses as "counting" towards earning a PhD. This means that if any engineering student wants to earn this certificate, he or she will have to take these four courses on top of the normal course load for a PhD. Nothing is completely decided yet but it seems counter-productive to me to working across departments like this to get the program in place and then to construct additional barriers to prevent students from actually participating in the program. Methinks the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.