did a very normal PhD presentation
(This post was originally posted on Cohost.)
These are slides from my presentation, delivered as part of the Cake Talks series, held by PhD students within Warwick Computer Science. The talk was for a varied audience which I expected to have very few Haskell people in, so it was at a high-level and much more focused on the blunders during and lessons learned from the PhD (so far, as I'm still writing up) rather than presenting all of the details of my work. The talk went really well - people were interested enough and followed well enough to ask some really good questions, including one that forced me to remember a proof I wrote a year ago!
I chose the word "blunders" in the description of my talk specifically, because I decided to tag each of my decisions using chess move analysis notation. Also, Professor Rowlett gave context for each move like a chess coach. There were a number of blunders, but honestly also a few "brilliant moves" for things I'm genuinely quite proud of. Writing it all out made me realise how much I'd done, and how much I've grown as a person. (Even ignoring trans stuff lmao.)
Combined with some meetings where my supervisors basically said that things are going well with the thesis writeup, I genuinely feel like I'm in a position to finish. I'm not going to estimate when because literally every estimate I've made of how long the thesis will take has been proven wrong, but I am quietly hoping it'll be done soon.
I can share the slides if anyone is interested, although I may want to take some time to make some notes about stuff that isn't on the slides first. (Which I'm not doing today, I have to clean the house because we move out in just under a month and the letting agents want to take photos...)