Thermoelectric and Heat Flow Phenomena in Mesoscopic Systems...DONE.

Super duper crazy happy news!

JASON FINISHED WRITING HIS DISSERTATION. His thesis. His PhD paper. His ultimate Physics final.

Five years of post-grad schooling; countless nights stuck in his windowless laboratory; 215 pages of cold, hard physics.

So maybe this is a bit of preemptive celebration, because there are a few more hoops he has to jump through before he gets to call himself "Dr. Matthews." He has to have a Board of Really Smart People with Foreign Accents and Beards read it over this week, and then he has his "Doctoral Defense" next Thursday. Whoo!

Although he's been working his tail off on writing it all summer, these past two weeks were especially insaneinthemembrane. At first, he was averaging about 5 hours of sleep per night.

At that point he was completely nocturnal. He'd go lay down on the couch in the afternoon, and turn to me with pleading, bloodshot eyes. He'd beg, "April, no matter what I say, I want you to wake me up in THREE HOURS. No 'fifteen more minutes.' Do whatever you have to do... even ice-water. Get me up."

Sorry, buddy, there's no way I could throw ice-water on that.

I'd dutifully wake him up, and he'd open one sleepy eye with a look of desperate anguish. Then he'd lay down the Kryptonite in a cute, sleepy voice:

"Cuddle?"
"Sweetheart, you're supposed to get---"
"Just five minutes?"
"But--"
"I miss sleeping next to you."

aaaaaaand BAM I was in his arms, and he was instantly making happy little snoring sounds.

Oh, MERCY, our future offspring will get away with anything if they inherit those puppy eyes.

Soon, the five-hour sleep average turned into just two hours a night. I'd try to wake him up, and he'd sleep talk something about "anisotropic thermoelectrics in four-terminal ballistic junctions."

The last three days (or should I say day-nights), he really got in a crunch and enlisted me to proofread every. last. page. So I got to dig through THIS for missed apostrophe's and little typos.

(Bahaha I just had to torment all you grammar OCD-ers out there-- apostrophes!!^^ I feel like I need to go wash my hands or something now.)

Anyway, I got to dig through every last page--twice--for little things like this:

I wish you could've seen the look on his poor, sleep-deprived face while he tried to figure out why I was "writing in Russian."

For now, he sleeps all he wants. I no longer have to stress about my failings as a sleep Nazi. Then once he's caught up, it's Power-Point time! Go Jason, Go!


Want to read more about his research? I tried to sum it up in English-for-humans here.