Monday, September 22, 2008

master studies

I did it! :) I defended my thesis and passed master finals from theoretical physics at Charles University in Prague couple hours ago.

After almost dropping out of my school exactly a year ago for not having enough credits to go to the next year, I gave myself an obligation to finish my school on time. I worked very hard the last year, I had to do 8 exams, some of them very hard, requiring more than a week of thorough learning and 9 seminars, requiring a lot of work too and also a master thesis, for which I had to had working finite element solvers and together with SymPy it took all my time and energy. I even had to cancel my trip to Austin and Caltech for the SciPy conference. But I finished my school after all, I am very happy about it.

Last year, two of my friends bet $100 between themselves that I will not finish on time. Jarda, who believed in me is now at Princeton doing his Ph.D. Matouš, who didn't believe in me, will now pay $100 to Jarda. I think that life is fair.:)

Now I'll be visiting pubs quite often and then I'll fix some long standing issues in SymPy, hopefully finish my Debian task & skills (to finally become a Developer couple months after that) and finally do useful stuff for my research with a fresh head now.

8 comments:

Unknown said...

Congratulation for everything Ondrej! Enjoy the celebrations and the excellent Checz beers!

Unknown said...

Yupiiii!!

Brian Jorgensen said...

I'm fairly amazed by your productivity. Well done, my friend!

Andi Albrecht said...

Congrats, Ondrej!

Travis said...

Hey Ondrej,

Congratulations! You were sorely missed at the SciPy Conference, but I'm very glad to hear you pushed through to get this done.

Dinner on me if you can get to the U.S.A. We'll get some Texas steaks and talk politics!

Fredrik Johansson said...

Congratulations, Ondrej!

Unknown said...

Hi Travis!

Absolutely. You whet my appetite, I'd like to get some real Texas steak right now. :)

And of course politics with you anytime. I just met one guy from Los Angeles two days ago in a pub and he didn't like Reagan, so you know, what to say. :)

Travis Oliphant said...

Ondrej,

Great job on finishing! Finishing the masters degree on top of all the contributions you've been making to the SciPy community is wonderful.

Count me in on that political discussion with Travis V :-)