I’ve just spent an exceptionally busy four weeks writing, reviewing and improving my literature review. This is the first major deadline in a doctorate, and at the least catalogues your chosen research area, and helps you to work out where to go next; the good ones do some analysis, too. I’m pleased to say I handed mine in yesterday. It was very hard work, and I was very pleased to get rid of it! It isn’t over, though, as I have a viva in just under three weeks. I hope, in the viva, to get in some good discussion about my future direction.
I won’t be thinking about that immediately, though, because I’m off to Florida on Monday. A group of us from ECS are attending the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing – I’m thrilled to have a scholarship! I attended a very useful briefing earlier this week. I have discovered that it isn’t a research conference, and it is very parallel: loads of streams to choose from. It’s all about motivating and inspiring women in computing, and is full of talks from women in industry and research, speaking about what they are doing, and why. (I think!) Another purpose of the conference is, I gather, recruitment of women who are about to graduate: so there’ll be lots of undergrads, and lots of big companies. That said, I hear there are plenty of postgrads there, too. Most of all, I am told, it is a celebration. I am intrigued!
The astute among you may have noted that the conference isn’t actually starting ’til the week after next: this is because myself and a friend are going out a week early, for a well-earned break!