Aperte.org Jeremy Handcock

Today was my last official day of graduate studies at the University of Toronto. My thesis readers approved my work, we filed all the paperwork required for me to graduate, and that makes me a Master of Science in Computer Science! Well, you know, save for the convocation ceremony.

A lot of the research papers I've read are scattered across my workspace, and as I cleaned up my cubicle in the lab today, I got a nice overview of all the interesting topics that I dove into in my courses and in my research: bioinformatics, social network systems, ubiquitous computing, human-computer interaction, information visualization, and of course, software engineering.

My time at UofT has been really fulfilling and I owe that mostly to Greg Wilson, my advisor. I came to grad school with the hopes of exercising my creativity and he gave me complete freedom in choosing my area of research. It was an incredible amount of work---definitely the most challenging thing that I've ever taken on---but it was really enriching and satisfying at the same time. I'm happy to say that I'm proud of the work that I've done. I'm going to incorporate some feedback from my thesis readers and I'll make my paper available online shortly.

I haven't figured out yet what's next for me. I decided a long time ago that I wouldn't be continuing on to the PhD program. I'll be starting a job search to return to industry pretty soon, but for now, I'm going to take a bit of personal time to decompress.

Now, off to uncork a bottle of bubbly!