::angels sing the hallelujah chorus::
On November 22, 2013 my favorite physicist officially became Dr. Jimmy Trevino (or, as he prefers it, Jimmy Trevino, PhD). The title of his dissertation was, "Detecting Communities in Complex Unipartite and Bipartite Networks by Maximizing the Modularity" and his advising professor was Dr. Kevin E. Bassler at the University of Houston. There is a little known rule in science-land that the titles of important papers must not be less than 10 words long. I'd say he succeeded. They are also allowed to make up words and use them as if they are real words that everybody knows. For example, "betweenness." Seriously, who says that???
I, of course, was super excited and happy all day while he spent the day being nervous. I was able to take the day off from work so I could be there for his defense and post-defense celebration on campus. Speaking of the celebration, the tradition is that the candidate bring food and drink for their research group (and anyone else who happens to follow their nose to the room with the food). While this seems a bit backward to me, we went along with it anyway.
We did not attend the graduation because the timing was awful with two small children, UH campus congestion, Houston traffic and impending travel to South Texas for Christmas. I wish we could have made it, but the pain and suffering required were not worth it at the end of the day. Instead we got a cute picture of Nathan in Jimmy's paraphernalia.
I wanted to include this achievement in our little book of memories for several reasons. First, because I am extremely proud of my wonderful husband for finally achieving his goal despite a few setbacks and kids along the way. Second, to encourage our children to not give up on pursuing dreams of higher education. It only took 14 years of post-secondary education to get here (August 1999 to November 2013). Fourteen loooong years, especially since I started funding this education in 2007 when we got married. I joke that he only married me as his sugar-mama so he could stay in school forever, although I eventually made the rule that he and our kids could not do homework at the kitchen table together. Despite the stress on our finances, having him in school while having our children was a blessing because it gave us an added dimension of flexibility that we badly needed. Because he is a theoretical physicist he was able to work from home some days and never had to stay on campus in a lab until all hours of the night. He subscribed to the Richard Feynman problem solving algorithm (supposedly coined in jest by another Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Murray Gell-Mann):
1. Write down the problem.
2. Think very hard.
3. Write down the answer.
Okay, okay, he doesn't do it quite like that, but he is very smart and it was nice that he could think from anywhere. In the end all the sacrifice was worth it of course and he now has a great job as a computational physicist for a start-up in Tomball that he says is just like school except he's getting paid (hooray!). One evening I asked how his day went at work and he said, "It was good. I drank coffee and did math all day." I guess for a physicist it can't get much better than that!
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