{"id":182,"date":"2003-02-24T02:31:31","date_gmt":"2003-02-24T02:31:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chekyang.com\/musings\/2007\/03\/the-great-adventure\/"},"modified":"2003-02-24T02:31:31","modified_gmt":"2003-02-24T02:31:31","slug":"the-great-adventure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/2003\/02\/24\/the-great-adventure\/","title":{"rendered":"The Great Adventure"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" id=\"image232\" src=\"https:\/\/chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/03\/SIA.jpg\" alt=\"SIA.jpg\" align=\"right\" \/>Today is the last day I&#8217;ll be spending in Singapore for a long while; as several friends and my colleagues know, I&#8217;ll be leaving for Perth tomorrow morning to do the remaining 3-4 years of my Ph.D program on campus at Curtin University. It&#8217;s a pretty strange feeling in several ways. For starters, this will be the first time I&#8217;ll be leaving Singapore for so extended a period of time &#8211; a few years I can manage; but it&#8217;s something else to leave for so long, and from indications, if I do accept any teaching responsibilities on campus, my research work will take stretch.<\/p>\n<p>I also feel a genuine sadness at leaving Informatics, my &#8216;home&#8217; for more than seven years now. Being in a single work place for so long means one develops substantial bonds and attachments to not just one&#8217;s colleagues, but also friends and the many students who have graduated, many of whom who still keep in touch with me.<\/p>\n<p>This Ph.D program has also been costly in every sense of the word too. A huge amount of time over the last 6 months has been spent in planning, making arrangements for my migration over; and the amount of money that will be eventually invested into this will be easily in the few hundreds of thousand dollars.<\/p>\n<p>Still, it&#8217;s a new opportunity where I consciously feel a phase of my life coming to an end, and the next one about to start tomorrow &#8211; in one sense, my research work will be like embarking on a long journey where I will travel around the world attending conferences and learning new ideas, get to (eventually) present my ideas and papers to a bunch of probably very critical academics, all of whom I have to acknowledge as my betters. It&#8217;ll certainly be a miracle if I can pull this jaunt off! I have probably less than half the confidence that my sponsors, character referees, my supervisor, and my Godmums all have in my being able to complete this program successfully.<\/p>\n<p>This page here will continue to be updated with personal thoughts and reflections; in the mean time, for friends who&#8217;re interested in learning about the journey through my eyes and words, do pop by to my Ph.D web site.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today is the last day I&#8217;ll be spending in Singapore for a long while; as several friends and my colleagues know, I&#8217;ll be leaving for Perth tomorrow morning to do the remaining 3-4 years of my Ph.D program on campus<\/p>\n<div class=\"entry-read-more\"><a class=\"read-more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/2003\/02\/24\/the-great-adventure\/\">Read More<span class=\"cleanwp-sr-only\">  The Great Adventure<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[644],"tags":[134,307],"class_list":["post-182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-everything-else","tag-curtin-university","tag-phd","wpcat-644-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}