PhD Defense

Feels kind of weird, now that I am Dr. Patel :). The feeling has not really sunk in yet. While I was never really stressed about the defense, the repeated practices did hurt the ego a little bit. Especially when friends were given the license to go for the jugular and boy did they go for it :). Thank you Varun, Zeesh, Swarnima, Joe, Vladimir, Jenne, Nic, Leo and Steve for listening to me drone away for a couple of hours.

Here is the room that was used for my defense. It has busts of Einstein and Feynman. Pretty scary ones. The same room was used for my candidacy as well. Being a bit obsessive about being early, I was there about an hour ago with some very nice cookies and with Varun on his way with coffee.


After the defense which was pretty peaceful, we had champagne that Xavier had brought for me. It was a very nice gesture from him to come all the way from Milwaukee. My committee really loved my thesis, for which I had Alan to thank for. We went to the Atheaneum (a very nice faculty club at Caltech) for drinks and popcorn afterwards. Here are some of the pictures we took there.



There are a lot more photos that need uploading. Will do so once I get the chance.