Missing the plot
I defended my PhD a month ago.
Preparing the defense was bizarre. Without a critical last week overview from my supervisors, I would have miss the plot.
Why? I spent three years digging a topic.
When I began, neither me nor my supervisors had a complete view on it.
This was about machine learning applied to the control of the injection molding process.
So I spent march preparing the defense at night, postdocing on days.
PhD defense slides
I wanted to use State Of The Art keynote tooling.
Like every academics, I have been into \documentclass{beamer} \usetheme{Frankfurt}.
So I builded a complete webapp with the great reveal.js.
This was awesome. I was able to stream the plot in realtime on the web, integrate <iframe> and many interactive Plotly.js 3D plots.
Wait, but man was it ugly..
I strugle to design a nice looking template. And then, integrating multiple <img> in the same slide needed to master precise css margin-top: 1.45px metrics.
When I show it a week before to it was still ugly. And it was mostly half finished. A shame when you had three years to did it.
So I followed the experienced professors, and go with PowerPoint. Overnight, from Monday to Tuesday, it was completly redone with a slick design.
PhD defense plot
Another big part of my strugling was the plot.
At first I tried to make an overview of my two hundred and a half pages manuscript.
Do not do that.
A defense is more like two or three papers put togethers with a catchy intro and many perspectives to guide the debate.
So, this was how I learned to PhD defense. Then, talking for three hours of my research was really easy and fun.
