I Submitted my Thesis!

Today I officially submitted my PhD thesis. The final document stands at 150 pages, 732 git commits and took me ten months to write. Frankly, it's hard to know how to feel about it, I guess I can count myself as "unemployed" now, rather than a PhD student.

I started writing it in January and set a goal to submit on June 30th, the day my funding ended. Getting your research and thesis done in three years is pretty fast, especially when I changed my topic from implicit automata to Weihrauch reducibility using containers. That work was just supposed to be that one blog post I wrote, but we got two papers out, including one for LICS, and there is enough material in my thesis for a third.

In the end, I didn't make that deadline --- I basically never make self-imposed deadlines. The hope was that I'd submit and my viva could happen before my supervisor was made redundant --- I never blogged about Swansea getting rid of ten computing staff --- but I blew past that possibility in September. Then I had to move back to Scotland, which made it harder to write, and I was in Germany for two weeks attending Colloquium Logicum and visiting Vasco Brattka in Munich.

It's done now. I don't really know if it's any good, but I guess real writers would say that a work is done when you can't bear to look at it any more. You can go and read the submitted version (pdf). In a sense, mostly I feel a tremendous loss of purpose. Yes, the defense still has to happen, but that feels abstract at the moment. Maybe I'll just make music until then...