Please note: there will be mentions of the current global public health crisis in this post. I have no background in medicine, public health, or closely-related fields. Please consult public health agencies and other governmental agencies for guidance regarding responses to this crisis, and please consult actual professionals as appropriate for individual problems in this context.
This post is the third in a series of three posts about the end of my time as a PhD student in Princeton University (in this post henceforth referred to simply as "the university" when there is no ambiguity). As a write this, I have successfully defended my PhD thesis! Furthermore, I will officially be graduating this coming weekend. This post follows the first, which was meant as a reflection of the events of this public health crisis that led to my premature physical departure from the university campus combined with a paean to the friends I made over the course of 6 years in the PhD program, and the second, which explained the experiences & thought processes that led to my decision to change careers from research in physics to transportation policy. This post is a broader reflection of my time and experiences at the university, with all of its ups and downs, and a message of gratitude toward the people in the university and elsewhere who meant so much to me during my time in the program; a lot of it is taken from the acknowledgments in my thesis, though for privacy reasons, I won't be giving explicit names. Additionally, there will undoubtedly be many comparisons over the course of this post to my undergraduate experiences at MIT, for which I wrote a post around the time of graduation 6 years ago. Follow the jump to see more.
This post is the third in a series of three posts about the end of my time as a PhD student in Princeton University (in this post henceforth referred to simply as "the university" when there is no ambiguity). As a write this, I have successfully defended my PhD thesis! Furthermore, I will officially be graduating this coming weekend. This post follows the first, which was meant as a reflection of the events of this public health crisis that led to my premature physical departure from the university campus combined with a paean to the friends I made over the course of 6 years in the PhD program, and the second, which explained the experiences & thought processes that led to my decision to change careers from research in physics to transportation policy. This post is a broader reflection of my time and experiences at the university, with all of its ups and downs, and a message of gratitude toward the people in the university and elsewhere who meant so much to me during my time in the program; a lot of it is taken from the acknowledgments in my thesis, though for privacy reasons, I won't be giving explicit names. Additionally, there will undoubtedly be many comparisons over the course of this post to my undergraduate experiences at MIT, for which I wrote a post around the time of graduation 6 years ago. Follow the jump to see more.
