Things aren’t going as quickly as I hoped they would when I wrote my last post on my thesis. I’ve had to choose between actually filing my thesis this semester and getting my results complete and published as quickly as possible — and my collaborators on ATLAS will be pleased to hear I’ve chosen the latter. It feels like robbing Peter to pay Paul, but I have to prioritize somehow. The problem, in the end, was just that writing the introductory chapters of my thesis was more work than I imagined; or maybe it was really that I knew I could use the summer as spare time, so I couldn’t force myself to work hard enough. In any case, I do have the summer, so things will be fine. My results are starting to move through ATLAS, and hopefully the remaining work will mostly be cosmetic. Once that’s definitely in good shape I’ll be able to focus on my thesis and file it in the first month or two of the summer.
In the meantime, I’m cutting back on other things I enjoy working on but don’t have time for. That means no more regular volunteering for the Prison University Project, where I’ve been teaching basic math to prison inmates for most of the time I’ve been in grad school. It also means, a bit more slowly, handing off my organizational responsibilities for the math class there, which have been great practice for academic politics. Finally, it means giving up on blogging for a while; I won’t be able to write more about finishing my thesis, or the transition to my new job — at least not until it’s started and I know if I have time!
So you won’t see me here for several months at the very least. In the meantime, you can see my occasional professional opinions and random comments about coffee on my Twitter feed, @sethzenz. I hope to be back as soon as I can, but in any case, thanks for reading!
