I have some exciting news to share with everyone; on August 12th, 2010 I successfully defended my dissertation (“Estimation of Glacier Ice Extinction Coefficients using Long-wavelength Polarimetric Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar”) and received the highest possible grade summa cum laude, which they apparently give out to less than 10% of all theses! I am thrilled to say the least and can’t stop grinning days later.
I thought I’d give a brief overview of the German PhD defence process. When officially submitting your thesis to the university there are of course reams of official German paperwork to fill out including statements saying that no one else wrote the thesis, a German resume, and numerous other oaths and confirmations . In my case because I was external, I also had to write a letter detailing all my contributions to research over the last four and a half years for them to even accept me. Once all that had been couriered to my university, I had to wait to see if they would take me. After a nail-biting week or so, everything was accepted and I could start panicking…..err studying.
Part of the tradition is to then visit all of the professors who will be on your committee. In my case there were five professors, two from my institute, and three from the University of Karlsruhe (about 4 hours from Munich by train). It’s kind of frustrating to make an 8-hour round-trip journey to introduce yourself and to talk to a professor for less than an hour, but I guess you gotta do what you gotta do. I was a little worried about the defence itself since only two of the five professors were under any obligation to even read the thesis; the others got to ask questions about whatever they wanted! The day before my defence I went to Karlsruhe to meet the last two professors, one of whom openly said that since my topic wasn’t even remotely in his field that he’d just ask me questions about hardware. Hardware was my nightmare since I come from a non-electrical engineering background, where a lot of that stuff is voodoo-black-box magic to me! Fortunately I had some cramming time that night and the questions weren’t as difficult as I had imagined.
The defence itself was held in a nondescript room in an old electrical engineering building, which was actually somewhat reassuring and nostalgic since it reminded me of the University of Calgary’s dingy, old engineering building.
The defence consisted of a 25 minute presentation, where I was encouraged to use all of PowerPoint’s bells, whistles, and animations to keep the professors interested. I found it very difficult to provide a good introduction to my complicated topic as well as all to my data, models, results, and validation within the required time, but it all came together. How much they understood though, I’ll never know! Other doctoral students from Karlsruhe were allowed to watch. A few colleagues from my institute also came along for moral support; it really is a good feeling to look out into the audience and see a few familiar faces in the crowd of strangers.
Then came the questions, which normally last 30 to 35 minutes, but in my case went on for almost an hour! I’d like to think that they were testing me to make sure I earned my grade, although it could be because of my wordy answers. I offered to answer the questions in English or German (I was told this is a good gesture). The first professor started in German and then the rest took their cue from him and so the entire grilling (much to my surprise) was in German, even with the professors I had previously only spoken English to. Despite throwing-in tons of English of expressions (my brain was too addled to translate “constructive and destructive interference” on-the-fly) I managed to make it through. I was then asked to wait outside while they conferred for twenty minutes or so.
Finally they invited me back in and told me my grade, and I came out where everyone was waiting. In a matter of seconds a graduation cap was placed on my head, a bouquet of roses in my hand, and a robe thrown on my shoulders. To be honest I was a little bewildered! We drank some champagne and ate some treats and then took the train back to Munich. Here are some pictures with the entire committee and audience members, as well as with my great colleagues who gave up an entire day to come support me.
Beautiful roses from my colleagues:
A really funny German tradition is the gift of the “Doktorhut”, a handcrafted graduation cap made by friends and colleagues. It’s supposed to reflect the research, personality, and characteristics of its owner, and my colleagues did a wonderful job! I’ve included some photos below.
I was particularly impressed with the scale-model plane (which normally carries our radar sensor) and the bent fork used to attach it to the hat! For the ultimate aficionados out there – they sacrificed an official Discraft 175 g disc for the making of the hat! The rest of the cap focuses on my Arctic research including photos from the field campaign, little yellow origami corner reflectors used for calibrating the radar data, and glued on polar bears.
A miniature copy of my paper accepted for publication formed the tassel.
How I will get this Doktorhut back to Canada in one piece is a good question. Speaking of which, I have a flight booked back to Calgary for September 9th. I’m really looking forward to seeing everyone again soon!
