My Seussical Life for 2004 October 10

This week marked a very important milestone for Dave in his doctoral work; he made his debut as a fledgling public budgeting academic at the Association for Budget and Financial Managment conference in Chicago. He presented two papers he's been working on for about the last 6 months. One of the papers was a duet piece with Kurt Wood, who graduated with his doctorate from KU in May. The other was a collaboration with Justin Marlowe and Jocelyn Johnston, both professors at KU. Dave came home last night from his trip pleased with his experience, but feeling like the little fish in a big pond.

Jocelyn and Justin suggested that Dave think about pushing through and finishing his PhD in three years instead of four, which is already an optimistic, fairly aggressive goal. This would mean two more years of extremely rigorous work for Dave, and a decent extra load of my own. I'm not sure what I think about it all; I'll have to decide some other less-stressful week.