So, finally, I’m done with my “Test” Thesis Defence. For those not used to the Japanese system of graduate studies, six months before you graduate, you need to perform a “mock examination”, where you do your thesis Defence in the same conditions as your final Defence, including to the same commitee. This committee will judge whether your work should be “ready” by the end of the following six months, and tell you what they think you need to do to complete your thesis.

Unlike many of the “rituals” of Japanese academia, this is one that I don’t find to be completely useless. The professors don’t read your thesis anyway, but at least they have the chance to make some serious questions to your work, and you have the chance to address those questions, which makes a kind of “building together” feeling which pleases me.

So most of my late December and all of January was spent preparing for it, a time where almost all of my other activities where stopped or cancelled. But it was actually worth it. I managed to get rid of 90% of the “drudge” of my thesis, and stablish all that had already been done. The presentation itself was much lighter than I expected, the professors liked my thesis and my results, which gave me a boost in confidence. Instead of making any big criticisms of my thesis, they all just suggested extensions to lines of research that I had already drawn out in the first place.

Now, after a month and a half in this backbreaking pace, I go back to “almost” my normal routine. I got two papers I have to finish by the end of march, so the idea is to do experiments now in Feb, and writing the results next month. Also, and perhaps most importantly, I’m now on “job hunting” season, which means getting my shit together to find out and apply to a few nice places to a post-doc/professor/researcher position. Of course, I also have to finish the changes to my thesis, but I got at least 4 months after these papers, so that is on hold. On the personal side, I want to return to regular geocaching, reading books, bi-weekly RPG games, and python programming. And writing a dozen of late blog articles I wanted to write about.

Heh, maybe I don’t have so much free time as I thought I would, but this is looking like a very interesting last year in Japan, if I can keep myself from procastinating too heavily :-)