Dear all,
my master thesis is done. That's actually not that accurate: I submitted already on Friday, June 16, on Monday the 26th I had my defense talk and I still need to give a talk during the Algant graduation days, (July 24-26) which could potentially change my grade :) But yesterday I sent the final version and I no longer have to write anything or change anything.
It's so great to have such a big chunk of work done. It went rather well: I was lucky that my advisor gave me a problem that was interesting to think about and solvable within the few months I had for my thesis and the math was beautiful and challenging as always. The defense talk was also lots of fun. My boyfriend forced me to prepare well - he even went to the department with me on Sunday afternoon to practice with the chalkboard. I also chose to give a talk that was a bit different than my thesis, telling a different story: more of a motivation and a bit more coherent. In short, I think I sold my thesis there much better and I am very happy with my talk.
Even though that after the talk I still had some time to fix the small mistakes and improve the exposition, I didn't really find it in myself to sit down and rewrite it to reflect my slightly different point of view on my thesis that I formed during the talk preparation. It does help to clear your mind when you try to summarize in 45 minutes what you'd been doing the past half a year or so. Even more so when you try to explain it to someone from the beginning, say to your fellow master students, not just to people who know already what you will be talking about. So there would be many things I could write better in my thesis, I've received some very helpful comments that perhaps should have been included in the thesis, but yeah, it's finished now.
Even more so, as there are other things I need to be doing now. I moved out from my house last Friday, I need to secure my degree also from my second university, Regensburg, which might be a bit bureaucratically challenging again, I'm moving to Berkeley in less than six weeks and need to get my visa and finances sorted out... Lots of things to do now. And the weather is finally a bit nice again, so there are also things I want to do, like biking around, swimming in the sea, genuinely enjoy my summer :)
But for those of you who are spending their summers more actively, here is a link to my thesis and also a link to the notes from the preparation for my talk. The talk notes are without any references and I didn't follow them that closely, so some bits might be imprecise, if not completely wrong.
https://sites.google.com/site/sotakovajanahomepage/master-s-thesis---class-invariants
