I haven’t updated this in a while, but it’s not because I haven’t been making progress.

I spent the fall semester continuing to meet weekly with the same committee member. We made a tremendous amount of progress, successfully developing a service composition optimization model in OPL. He devoted so much time to it that my adviser suggested I consider asking him to be a co-adviser for my dissertation. I gather that being a dissertation adviser is something of a feather in a professor’s cap, and he did help me a lot, so it seemed like the right thing to do.

He agreed to be a co-adviser, which was the easy part. Now comes the hard part: getting two professors to agree that I A) have done enough to graduate, and B) agree on the content and format of my dissertation. I had already spoken to the more senior adviser at the end of the fall semester, and he agreed that I had enough work done. So we hashed out a dissertation outline and over the break I started filling it in. After meeting with him again at the start of this semester, I got a confirmation that I can finish this semester. (Frankly, I told him that this was my last semester one way or another. I’ve been at this for 10 years, and I’m broke and tired.)

I let the co-adviser know about this at the start of this semester, and his immediate comment was that we need to discuss how much I’ve done to see if I have made enough of a contribution for a dissertation. Let the fun begin.