Palfrey's life

Hell yes. I am now officially in posession of an MSc degree from Delft University of Technology. Or, if I read the other side of the certificate, I'm now able to call myself Ir. Tom Parker. This was originally thought of by me as mostly an "administrative detail" on my path to getting a PhD, but has ended up causing me untold levels of stress, loathing the TU Delft admininstration system and the fricking confusing system here, and generally noting that if anyone asks you "do you want to do two degrees at the same time" the only sane answer is "no f*cking way".

The ceremony was fun. Different from the UK ones that I've seen in several notable ways:

• Less formal. (Mostly) suits, but no gowns. No city officials. Just held in a random large lecture theatre on the ground floor of the faculty. A complete lack of advertising - I *never* recieved an invite for it at all, and had to query one of the other students, who'd actually had to ring up the admin people to find out when/where it was.


• Smaller. ~30 students graduating vs. hundreds. This was just our faculty tho (CS, EE, Math), and it did meant they could give a little (~2 mins) talk on what each student did for their thesis, which expanded it out to a bit over an hour.


• Almost entirely in Dutch. Given that there's a university-wide commitment to doing all of the MSc courses in English (and this was just MSc students), and the thesi (sp?) were in English, this was a bit surprising. Main reasoning would be that I was the only non-Dutch student graduating that day, as the other international students had done their bit ~3 months earlier. Luckily my supervisor decided to switch to English for my bit, so at least my parents and brother (who were there) could at least understand that bit. They now also have a greater understanding of the language barrier that I've faced....

This almost didn't happen, as apparently I was missing for the mark for a module (which was one of the one's that I was getting for "free" due to having done certain things during my BSc), and I owed them some money (for getting certain marks in later than I should have). Now, given as the only (rather confusing) query I got about this was two days before the ceremony (they claim others, I claim they're talking out of their collective backsides) and while I'm 4000 miles/6 timezones away, it could have very easily gone shit-shaped, and resulted in my having to wait another 6 months (which as previously noted would have been seriously doubleplusungood). However, again I have my supervisor to thank. I owe Koen 400 euros (which is getting transferred to his bank account the second I'm not still sleep-deprived), as well as every beer he wants between now and the heat death of the universe.... At a certain level "helping his student navigate through the PhD" is the job description of a supervisor, but his actions in this matter have been majorly above-and-beyond, and I owe him vast kudos/material goods on this one.

This all actually happened yesterday afternoon, while I'd been awake for about 26 hours straight at the start of the ceremony, and about 32 by the time I got some sleep (post-ceremony drinks in faculty, followed by dinner w/ family. I wasn't feeling too sleepy at the beginning, so I went ahead with it). Interesting thing happened with the flight - I got bumped from Continental due to some delays on the first leg of my flight, which resulted in their not being able to guarantee my second leg, and ended up on a KLM flight. This would probably have cost me quite a lot more to choose it if I'd had the option to start with, as a) it was a direct flight and b) they have a very cool on-flight entertainment system, with a vast range of choice and a personal little screen in the back of the seat in front of you. As I couldn't get any sleep (flight was between 7pm-12:30 am personal internal time), I watched Fantastic Four and Madagascar. After getting back from that, and doing all the other just mentioned stuff yesterday, I slept in today until about 3pm-ish, spent a couple of hours churning through resizing photos, then went for another meal w/ family (as they're still here and still paying....). I think overall my internal clock is mostly reset, and I'm going to get some more sleep in a little while. (Limited) photos will be up once I find the damn cable....