Soutenance et Pot de Thèse

Timeframe: Nov 14, 2008

A lot of people are giving their final defense (soutenance) of their PhD thesis (thèse) around now. So far there have been a couple of people from our group and 2 out of the 3 people in my lab. On Monday Chuck Hansen (the teacher from Utah who gave me the opportunity to come over to France) is coming to be on a PhD jury for Guillaume (William) who's a lab mate of mine.

Today was Kevin's soutenance. He'd already defended in the states (University of Central Florida), but to get his PhD from the university here in Rennes he needed to defend again. It was interesting to see his whole talk about the tree and grass stuff we'd talked about earlier. Even though the teachers seemed friendly, they were very aggresive in their questioning. Although Kevin seemed to handle all the questions fairly well. The presentation was 50 minutes long and they grilled him for another hour after that.

The "Pot de Thèse", which is a small gatherwing with food after the defense, was interesting. In the few defenses I've been to in the states they put the food out before the defense so people can eat while they're watching you defend. But here the party was half an hour after the defense was actually over. They had a bunch of little finger foods (some of the cakes were tasty, along with the flan), and Kevin even brought a bunch of bottles of real champagne. I know that wouldn't work well for a work party in the states, but I have no idea if you can do that for a thesis defense or not. It was basically a bunch of people hanging around congratulating Kevin and eating free food and booze. Think missionary farewell and you'll have a pretty good idea of what it was like.