A brief update from the trenches. Working extremely hard to wrap up that last draft of my PhD manuscript. I’m almost there, over 95% is done. But as they say in Dutch, the latest bits are the heaviest of all. Chapter 2 till 8 (out of 8) are done and delivered and need some very minor tweaking. As we speak I’m working on chapter 1 and then it’s mostly redrafting. I’ve set my official deadline at April 1. This means that, with a bit of luck, I can defend my PhD late June. If that for some reason won’t work, it will be early September. I really, really hope to defend it before the Summer break. But how the Dutch system works is that the moment the PhD committee accepts the manuscript, I’m done. The defense is somewhat formal and maybe even very tough but is rarely (i.e. never) a deal breaker.

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