Belated Tau Day, 2021

I remembered to mention Tau Day yesterday in the CAS Slack, but forgot to mention it here until today! Possibly because I came down with some sort of stomach bug overnight and maybe wasn't thinking clearly yesterday evening. Thankfully I'm mostly recovered today.

While I'm ruminating about it, I figured it might be a good time to talk briefly about where I'm at in my PhD, and life more generally. As I've probably mentioned before PhDs in Australia are nominally three years, but enough people go longer that extensions to 3.5 years are pretty routine at this point (at least at Swinburne). The greatest import of the extension is that it extends the stipend PhD students get to live on—quite important in an expensive city like Melbourne. My six-month extension expired at the beginning of April, but luckily I'd saved up enough to live off for a few months and there was—coincidentally—an announcement for applications for a special COVID-19 stipend extension of up to three months for students in my position (having exhausted the regular six-month extension but just needing a few more months to finish, plus a few other criteria).

I applied for the extension at the end of April, estimating that I hoped to submit my thesis before the end of August. I got an email back acknowledging receipt of my application and waited for the results, which had been mentioned to be announced around mid-May. As the end of May came and went, I asked around and heard from two friends (fellow astronomy PhD students) that they'd both gotten an affirmative answer the Friday before, so I was starting to wonder. This was right around the time Melbourne went into its fourth lockdown for two weeks or so, so I figured maybe the process was moving slowly (so not all the announcements went out at once) and working from home had perhaps slowed it down. Finally, after another week I sent a polite inquiry as to when I might expect to hear something back.

To my great surprise—and no mild shock—I got a reply back from the dean of the Science, Education and Technology faculty (who was in charge of reviewing the applications) saying that the person who'd sent the acknowledgement-of-receipt email was no longer with Swinburne and that he had no record of my application(!) but that I could send it to him and he'd take care of it. (He could obviously tell from the email timestamps that I'd sent it before the deadline.) Thankfully it proved to be a quick process when I did (with a casual mention that I was coming along nicely with the thesis completion plan I'd laid out back in April), and this past week I got word that my application had been approved and extension granted.

So that's where I'm at, at the moment: still working away at the two papers which will contain pretty much the entirety of my PhD research, and then form the basis of the science chapters of my thesis. Which I'm still hoping to submit by the end of August. And I now shouldn't have to worry about running out of money along the way any more, so while I won't be truly relaxed until after I submit I'm a lot less stressed than I was a week ago. And that's probably enough for this “brief” post. A hui hou!