Basking.

Condensing a thesis into a palatable 10 pages or less and depressing and difficult. Depressing because you know how much work went into the single word "optimize" and as much as you would like to relive every painful little detail for the pity points from your reader, you know no ones really cares. Difficult because you are now only comfortable explaining concepts based on chapter and section formation, so being succinct just isn't easy when you have already blathered on endlessly about a topic.

But finally, after SIX months, I have a draft to submit to my collaborators on the plasma wake field experiment. Ignoring for a moment the fact that it took me SIX months to write it, my advisor seemed particularly proud about it after all the edits. Hearing words like "excellent" and "really good" from someone you admire, made me feel totally warm and fuzzy, especially since I know he's not the type to gush praise. Granted it took me SIX months to finish, so it damn well better be "excellent" and "really good", but that is beside the point when you are feeling warm and fuzzy.

Comments

[zerocold]

I hope you will put your thesis in internet as we can read it...

[mick]

Wow, thesis -> 10 page paper. That's some god hacking!

BTW someone should write a computer program that just takes a thesis.tex file and spits out a paper...

[Rutger]

isn't that called latex?

:)

[m.visaya]

about (17+/-sqrt(3))/6 of a sheet of a cake, give or take and you have a reader's digest. not much unless it is technical, which it is, in this case, mr. waller?(diz-462)

[Caolionn]

zerocold - You might want to wait until the 10 page version is published, but if you are the over-achieving type you can read the whole version here:

http://www.slac.stanford.edu/pubs/slacreports/slac-r-777.html