candidate

It's an important day to me. I passed the ATC ("advanced to candidate", not "at the counter") exam this afternoon. It's one of the most important exams I have ever taken at UCLA. Now I have become one of the PhD candidate.

I worked on many projects before. But unfortunately I didn't make good enough performance and I didn't get good results. It came to last November that I started a new project. I got some interesting ideas with the help of my advisor and did some numerical experiments to prove it. I wrote a paper with my advisor and some other coworkers. Today I presented my work in the exam. To have a warm-up practice, I gave a talk at last week in a seminar.

The presentation is not so hard to me. But there're something unexpected happened. One committee member asked me some questions, which were not easy to explain clearly. I don't think that I gave perfect answers to him. My advisor helped me.

In the talk at last week I skipped some theoretical part in my paper. The reason I thought included: first the theoretical part was mainly done by my advisor and one coauthor, not by me, second is that it would take a long time to explain the theorems to the audiences. But today my advisor was so angry on me. He said I should not skip this part since it's very important in my work. He asked me to explain it on the blackboard.

The worst thing happened. I forgot the formulae. I should remember it since I used it many times. I don't know why I couldn't recall it during the presentation. Maybe I was too nervous. Although I found out everything eventually, my advisor was disappointed on me. After the exam he told me again: you should not skip your main contribution in the presentation, it's important to the committee.

He is right. I know. But there's no chance for me to retry. Because of this unexpected interruption, I couldn't finish all the slides. And another bad thing happened: my laptop ran out of battery! I thought the battery should be enough for the presentation, but it just ran out. What a world.

Thanks to the nice and patient committer members, who still gave me good evaluations, I passed the exam. And now I am a PhD candidate. I will be on a new stage towards my doctor degree and further career goals.