Congrats Lis!

Lis passed her defense with flying colors! :-)

Her little brother, Lawrence, and I went up a bit early to hang out with her on Tuesday. Mostly to make sure the presentation was all in order (PowerPoint + sounds = terribad problems) and to calm her down. She was halfway between panicked and excited, for obviously understandable reasons. But she knew she'd do alright! At 2pm the presentation started, and it lasted about 40 minutes. For being nervous, you sure couldn't tell it from where I was sitting! Everything went swimmingly well. Then the audience got to ask questions. And it was a fairly large audience for a defense -- a packed house! There were about 25-30 people there, which was really nice to see. The questions weren't unexpected. It was the usual sort of stuff that Lis would get when presenting things like her poster. So she fielded the five or six questions without a problem. Once the audience was done asking questions, then everyone had to leave except Lis and her committee so that they could ask her questions. Obviously that went well -- they signed off on everything!

It's kind of strange how two years worth of constant stress, sweat and labor all boiled down to about two hours of talking. But Elissa made it through, and she'll be graduating on June 13th with her Masters in Entomology from one of the top-ranking schools in the world!

Congrats! I'm so proud!!