That’s right – about 3:30PM today, I passed my dissertation defense and am semi-officially a Ph.D. I say semi-officially because there is some paperwork in the way, but for the most part… it’s done. It’s an odd feeling.
The defense went well. As I mentioned last time, the dissertation technically involves two sections: the public presentation and the private examination. No one showed up to the presentation, so it all got sort of smushed together in my case. My chair, John Campbell, sent me out of the room before things started so that the committee could meet in private. I was brought back in a couple of minutes later, and gave my presentation in just over an hour, punctuated by questions throughout. I was sent outside again, during which the faculty passed ballots around and presumably chatted a bit about my performance, after which my advisor walked out and greeted me with a “Congratulations, Dr. Landers.”
I went through what I’ll call the Four Stages of Ph.D. Achievement, similar to the Seven (correction: Five) Stages of Grief, but slightly less depressing:
- Shock: For about 10 minutes, I just shook hands and said “thank you” to my committee members. It just wasn’t real yet.
- Giddiness: After all, this was the conclusion of 21 years of education. I am, for the first time in recent memory, not a student, and that kind of closure is a little overwhelming. Everything seemed just a little funny. And I couldn’t stop smiling.
- Eerie Calm: This meant browsing the Internet and reading on Facebook as if nothing had changed from three hours earlier.
- Acceptance: Oh right. I still have a ton of work.
There are only 25 days until we move, and I have many loose ends to tie up, so there’s actually a ton left to do. When it comes down to it, the dissertation is just another study, only with higher stakes attached to it, and I still have other studies, grant proposals, and projects to worry about. Plus packing.
A bright point in the storm: after I dropped off my “final oral dissertation defense” form with the signatures of my committee on it, I decided to drop by my Intro to I/O class currently-in-progress. My teaching assistant, Stacy, had graciously volunteered to run the final class/review session if I didn’t get done with my defense in time to attend. When I got there, Stacy was going over one of the worksheets with her back to the door. As I sat down in a chair at the front behind her, a group started clapping over her talking which quite quickly transformed into a full classroom full of applause. Which, I have to admit, felt pretty good.
Our new house!
It’s done; we own a house! And it all came down to a last-minute 1.5-mile bike ride through suburban Minneapolis.
Oh yes – I’m serious. It’s been nearly a month since my last post on home buying, but that’s because not much happened until yesterday. In the three weeks until yesterday, all we’d been doing was randomly stopping in Home Depots and Lowe’s to check out carpet, laminate, paint colors and types, and so on; we picked a carpet and a brand of laminate. We also found homeowner’s insurance, which is surprisingly difficult when you live anywhere vaguely close to coastal area. We are technically 1500 feet from a bay that attaches to the Atlantic and about 8 miles from the beach, which apparently makes us a “hurricane risk.” One insurer outright told us that they were unwilling to insure us. But we eventually found one, and everything related to the loan and closing was taken care of on our end over a week ago.
After doing that, as there wasn’t much left for us to do, we just waited. So by yesterday, we started to wonder if we were really going to close on this house on time. The sellers were supposed to do repairs, which it didn’t look like they had done. We also had never been given instructions on where to send our down payment, so no money had changed hands.
Then yesterday, our loan officer e-mails us our settlement statement – the final summary of our loan – with the April 30 closing date. Surprise! I also learned a little more detail on where closing costs go; the statement lists around 15 distinct parties receiving money as a result of this sale. It was also a bit of a surprise to learn that our closing costs were $1000 greater than our good faith estimate had indicated they would be.
Of course, at this point, it was too late to send a check – we got the statement at 11PM the day before closing, so we obviously couldn’t mail a check that would arrive in time. No problem – we’ll just do a wire transfer tomorrow.
I wake up this morning to find my wife telling me that I have to initiate the wire transfer as soon as possible, only minutes before she walks out the door to head to work. She’d just received a call that the closing was scheduled 3 hours later, and wire transfers, according to the company handling our title, take up to 2 hours to go through. Annoying, but no problem, I think. I’ll just call the bank and initiate the transfer. I sit on hold for 20 minutes and finally get a bank representative. “I’d like to initiate a wire transfer,” I say.
To which the representative replies, “You can only initiate wire transfers at a branch office.” The problem is that at this point, it’s 2.5 hours until closing, the transfer will take 2 hours, and my wife has the car at work, where she is actively lecturing for at least an hour. My scooter is also non-functional; we are missing a bolt/nut combo that apparently allows the entire thing to turn on. So what option did I have left? That’s right – the bike.
Not having biked since last fall (it’s still cold in Minneapolis in April), I hunted down the bike pump in a closet, pulled the bike from where it was stored, filled the tires to 70PSI, and 2 hours and 10 minutes before closing, took off down suburban Minneapolis streets for the local branch office 1.5 miles away. 7 minutes later (averaging 13 mph over 18 blocks, including several stop lights and signs!), I arrive panting at the branch office. I sit down with the manager, hand her my ID, give her the routing and account numbers for the title company, and initiate the transfer. Crisis averted, and only a minute or two late.
After a much deserved break at D’Amico & Sons, I bike back more slowly and arrive home about an hour after I initiated the transfer. And look – in my e-mail, a message from the loan officer that the wire transfer had been received 15 minutes ago and all was well. Fantastic. Nothing like an unnecessary sense of urgency to get the adrenaline moving.
And finally, after all of this, it was quiet. No messages, no phone calls. Nothing. Two hours of silence after our closing supposedly occurred, I receive an e-mail with the subject “Congratulations are in order.” Finally, we are homeowners. And it is a process that I hope I never have to go through again!
Courtesy flickr.com
Discrimination isn’t in itself a bad thing, which is a hard concept to get across to my undergraduate classes. In order to make good hiring decisions, you have to discriminate: this person has more experience, that one has a more favorable personality profile, this one has a better college GPA, and so on. It is only illegal to discriminate on the basis of a protected class: race, color, religion, sex, and national origin are the traditional protected classes, while special protections also exist for those over the age of 40 and those with disabilities.
I mention it now because of a recent story about an 87-branch Texas-based bank chain forbidding the use of social networks by its hiring managers when making selection decisions. This isn’t actually illegal – if a hiring manager who doesn’t know you can find information about you on the Internet, that information is considered public, and thus legal to use in making a hiring decision. So if you thought that your Facebook profile picture with a headshot of you drinking a mug of beer bigger than your head might lower your chances to get a job… well, you’re probably right.
But there’s a gray area. Even though this information is technically public, it’s also likely to contain tidbits that an organization is not allowed to ask about – such as an impending or current pregnancy. The following example from the article makes it pretty clear:
“If you hired her and you didn’t know [about the pregnancy] and then she had attendance issues, you could fire her — it’s a legal reason,” Solomon says. “But the fact that you didn’t bring them on board to begin with, that would be hard for the employer, once they’d been exposed to illegal information, to be able to demonstrate that it wasn’t the fact that she was pregnant, it was something else.”
The key here is that it’s not that illegal discrimination actually occurred – it’s that it could have occurred. And because the organization can’t prove that it didn’t, it leaves a large lawsuit-shaped loophole. This Texas-based bank chain has chosen to close the hole by preventing hiring managers from accessing that information in the first place. But is that too far? Are social networks a valuable source of public information for hiring managers to get a better idea of who they might be selecting into the organiation, or does accessing such information represent a breach of privacy?
Or perhaps even more pointed – is it the responsibility of the company not to access this information, or is it the responsibility of the applicant to properly safeguard this information in the first place? I don’t know that I have an answer.