I gave a presentation at school this Wednesday as proposal for my PhD thesis. I was informed yesterday afternoon that I passed this qualification exam, for which the pass rate is set to be no more than 80 percent. Not a big deal, and even not worth congratulation. But overall it was an interesting process.
It is totally beyond my expectation that I spent so much time preparing for the presentation. My mentor pushed me to make several major revisions on the slides during the past two weeks. In the end he even revised the ppt file himself slide by slide. Far more important than learning some special tricks to produce slides (especially in Chinese characters), I discussed with my mentor from a rather high level about the potential research directions, the methodology to complete a PhD thesis, as well as some technical insights into texture synthesis.
Actually I had a terrible dry run in front of my mentor the day before the presentation, during which I could not even speak in Chinese fluently. But somehow I managed to control my mood during the proposal, and gave the presentation peacefully without screwing up anything.
Chongyang Ma's Blog 