Yesterday five years of hard work finally came to a conclusion in the defense of my dissertation.

Being a PhD student was the most challenging thing I ever did in my professional/academic career – all the memes are true. While you’re doing it, you feel like you are climbing a never ending mountain that just keeps getting higher and higher. And when you finally think you reach the end (submitting the dissertation), there’s another mountain waiting for you (defending the dissertation), and then another small hill (publishing the dissertation). And only then it’s finally done.

How do you even compress 5 years of work / 200 pages into a 20 minute presentation? It’s seems like another steep climb up the mountain, but I did it. The final step is giving this 20 minute presentation, and then answering challenging questions for 40-70 minutes. It was nerve-wracking, but I did it!

This will be the culmination of my academic career, as now I’m starting to focus on my jobsearch again, and I’m hoping to soon join the #industry in an interesting position that allows me to use all of the skills that I acquired during my past five years of juggling language, datascience, writing and managing multiple subprojects. Wish me luck!

(This was originally posted on my LinkedIn profile).