2024-08-01: My PhD Voyage
One day, as I sat playing Candy Crush for the hundredth time on the sofa, I thought, "I could be doing something more productive with my spare time." While there were probably hundreds of other things I could have considered, this made me start contemplating my third return to college to pursue a doctoral degree. A pretty decent tuition assistance program provided by my employer made the thought even more tempting. Therefore, I decided to proceed with submitting an application for graduate school. I also began looking into ongoing research at Old Dominion University (ODU) and contacted some professors as potential advisors. I was at Disney World in Florida with my family in August 2016 when I took a pause from the day's activities to check email on my iPhone. At that time, I saw the email informing me that I had been accepted into the Computer Science PhD program at ODU. Although I applied earlier in the year, some recent unfortunate events made me question...