Last semester in my PhD

After have been in the new job for about a month, I finally find time to write about my last few months of the graduate student life. The last semester was especially too busy for me. The reason, I am done with most of the research except for the final evaluation of the system. Oh by the way, my topic of research was Music Recommendation System With Song reviews, with focus on summarizing the album reviews and generating song reviews from them. Though the work was so trivial that I needed a few people (about 40 or so) to use my recommendation system which I am sure will be done in a couple of weeks, and my write-up also in a good shape with only the evaluation and conclusions left to be written. The most frustrating part was the publications, especially in the research area like mine papers where the end result is very important, its very difficult to get a publication until there is a complete system in place. This is the major problem I had with respect to graduating. I submitted a couple of papers in the previous semester but with only few portions of the evaluation and none were accepted. Finally, with all the results I submitted a paper to Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL most prestigious conferences in the field of linguists.
My dissertation was scheduled on April 19th 2010 and the results of ACL will be on 20th. So finally, I appeared for my dissertation defense without any formal publications as yet. (There was one more journal paper which needs a little more work which I was hoping to complete by the end of summer). Three of the committee members were of linguistics background and understood my situation and were ok to graduate me however two others were not willing to. They then decided to wait until I finish the journal or I get a publication. That day was a real nightmare for me. I should be way happy that I completed the last step in my PhD but however, the comments from my committee regarding the publications, just made me down. No one should ever go though such a situation.

But all is well that ends well. On 20th ACL has sent me the notification that my paper was accepted as long paper (the highest category for any publication at ACL). The comments the reviewers of the paper made were so consoling to me. That is the main reason we came up with this solution, I thought. The comments were so to the point and showed me clearly that I was able to make them understand through my paper what we intended to do. This is going to be presented in Sweden in july 2010. And now the committee is also satisfied with the comments. On May 6th 2010, I submitted the final thesis to the graduate school which has been approved after a couple of hours of scrutiny. In fact, the acceptance was sitting in my mail box when I reached home and officially, I am now Dr. Swati.

After a month in my job, when I look back a few months ago, if I think of that one day in my life that turned everything, I think probably if I had my dissertation 2 days later I wouldn't have gone through this. But now, I am very happy. I even attended the graduation ceremony where I was hooded on may 8th 2010. A happy happy moment in my life, with my husband, son and my degree :)