Sunday, June 5, 2016

The Q

The qualifying exam will be given September 16. While I don't expect it to be as brutal as the one I took at Cornell, it's something to be taken rather seriously.

It makes for a potentially redeeming weekend. Right after finishing the exam, I'll be heading down to Berryman to run the Mark Twain 100 the next day. That's the only running race I've ever dropped out of. As with leaving Cornell, there were very good reasons to pull out, but it still feels like unfinished business.

So, in the space of 48 hours, I can assert that I really do intend to finish a PhD and assert that the DNF at Mark Twain was the fluke it appeared to be. Granted, I'm the only person in the world who looks at at either of those decisions to quit as a failure (well, maybe my Cornell adviser saw the first that way), but there is something very satisfying about going back and doing something right when the first try didn't work out too well.

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