Bergen Break-Away
I didn't have time to blog that I was going to Bergen to attend Jill's defense, but you might have seen my name over at Jill's or Torill's and guessed what I was up to (Torill actually also took blogger-spot picture of me to prove it!)...

I left monday and returned wednesday and so was able to hear Jill's test lecture, her defense and then wednesday, a talk by her "first opponent" Marie-Laure Ryan on maps in cyberspaces. So it was a nice combo of relaxation and professional input - and it was also nice to re-visit Bergen University and talk to some of the people I got to know when I was studying there two years ago. Especially it was "hyggeligt" (nice, cosy) to meet Hilde and Carsten again.

Overall, it is interesting to experience this joint "coming of age" period: since last time I met them, Torill and Hilde have defended their degree and become doctors...and Jesper who came from Copenhagen too, is waiting for his defense to be scheduled. And in Oslo Anders Fagerjord is preparing his defense in December. Jill herself is, of course, now a well-deserved "doctor designatum" (waiting for official approval by the faculty after the committee accepted the ph.d. thesis etc).- I'm starting to feel old. Not in a bad way, but in a good way. It feels great to experience that the group of people I started knowing back at the Atlanta DAC conference in October 1999 are all moving on and that we have all matured as researchers in each our way; that there are academic futures ahead for most of us and many possible conference get-together's awaiting us, but also a past behind us; memories of early papers, of drunken parties, of shared insecurities and heated discussions; discourses and digressions which have turned many of these people into not just colleagues, but also friends.

Oh, and the defense? Both this and the test lecture gave me good food for thought and Jill appeared calm and reasonably relaxed most of the time. Also the opponents brought up some good and valid points of critique and discussion (though I could have done without the lengthy mock documentary viewing which Bjørn Sørensen brought into the equation - even if it was fun!).

I really liked Jill's presentation of her work, the one that opened the defense, and this was also the one time, I really wished that the more formal and serious Norwegian defense ritual would be more like the Danish, giving the defendant (the candidate?) more than 20 minutes to present her work. The test lecture might be a good way to test people's ability to present a subject (?!?), but since this subject is decided on by others and perhaps not always very close to the central subjects of the thesis, it appears to me to be more of a distraction from "the real thing", taking a lot of time and energy from the candidate. I think one event should be enough and that focus should be entirely on the thesis itself, but hey it might just be me speaking as a spoilt Dane who believes that peoples' teaching and communication skills should already have been proved in their teaching and their paper writing throughout the ph.d. project years and therefore need not be proven (again) at a test lecture.

On the other hand, the test lecture in combination with the defense itself turns the entire event of becoming a doctor into something that lasts for quite some time, thus providing a sonorous full stop to three long and important years of a candidate's life. I thoroughly enjoyed being part of it all, especially, of course, the party. You should have seen the late night "Fame" dancing - you would have thought that we had all spent several years at Juilliard...Life as an academic CAN be fun!
# posted by Lisbeth at: 13:45