Sunday, September 23, 2018

The day I became a Doctor

I'm very glad  and relieved  to share the news that I became a doctor last week! It might take some time for the university to publish my PhD thesis, so I've decided to make the preprint of the thesis available for download here. I've also created a GitHub repository to share the R code used in the data wrangling, mapping and analysis in the thesis.

My examiners were Nihan Akyelken and Bert van Wee. They were super kind but very challenging, nonetheless. In the end, the PhD viva lasted for 2.5 hours and I was super nervous the whole time. I really enjoyed the viva, though, and I was so surprised when they said I had passed with no corrections that I almost jumped out of my chair. I got this result largely because of my incredibly  demanding  tireless supervisors Tim Schwanen and David Banister, to whom I'm extremely grateful.  All in all, I'm feeling incredibly happy and thankful for the whole journey and the support I received along the away from my family, friends and supervisors. It’s been a truly wonderful and humbling experience.

ps. I still have two papers of the thesis currently under review, but finishing the PhD means that now I'll have much more time to  procrastinate  work on new projects and some others that were put on hold.

photos by my lovely wife, Fabiana - also known as my third supervisor :)