First, am I the only person that doesn’t give a flying rat’s ass about Miley Cyrus’s sweet 16?  Please tell me I’m not.

Anyway.  I had my program committee meeting today to look over my coursework and approve my plan for the spring (and my final semester of coursework!).  I was ridiculously nervous for some reason – I mean, really, I handed out copies of my coursework form, and they asked me a few questions, what did I have to be nervous about? – but the first of my committee members showed up who is a younger professor, fairly new out of school himself.  I told him I was nervous, and he said “Come on, take me!” and sat down at the conference table, and held out his arm to arm wrestle me.  Ok.  So when my next two committee members walked in, there I was holding my own quite well in an arm wrestling match.  Nervousness subsided quite a bit after that.

We talked about my coursework, my plan for the spring, and then they brought up the death question: “If you’re going to do an experiment for a dissertation, do you think you need a higher level statistics course?”  Of course I do.  I suck at stats.  We all know this.  Do I want to take one? No.  Not even a little bit.  After throwing out a few options, my arm wrestling committee member offered the option for me to take a 1 credit independent study with him in the spring, and he would do a focused study with me of the different higher level statistics I might encounter.

PHEW!  And can I say again, PHEW!  My program chair asked if I was ok with that, and I had to really hold back from saying “Hell f**king yes!”  His reasoning was that if stats was that rough for me, I’d probably do a lot better with a one-on-one approach, where he could be sure that I was going to be doing statistics that were going to be relevant to the kinds of things I studied – and I wouldn’t have to be sitting in a Ph.D. level Biostatistics course trying to figure out multivariate statistics with 20 other people in the room vying for the professors attention.

If I wasn’t in a committed relationship, and he wasn’t married, I might have kissed him.

So I have a plan.  My four committee members divided up how they would ask my comp questions, and my chair signed off on my coursework plan.  In the spring, I’ll take two seminars, the independent study, and three hours of dissertation research.

Suddenly, this seems real to me.  I’m not just back in school – I’m entering the final phase of the last coursework I’ll ever be taking (well, unless I get the crazy idea to get another Ph.D., but I would say the probability of that is close to never).  It’s kind of sad – I really enjoy being in class, and I almost don’t want it to end.  It’s also scary as hell – I’m going to be tested on what I’ve learned, and I need to come up with a dissertation topic.  I’m not scared to write the dissertation at all – I’m actually slightly sick in that I’m actually looking forward to it.   Last year when I started the program, comps and dissertation seemed so far away and so unattainable.

Now?  In about 8 months I’ll take my comps.  In about a year and a half?  I’ll officially be a Doctor.

Seriously, when did I get this old?