Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

Last night I changed my mind about allowing my thesis advisee to ask his panelists if he could remove from his objectives the part about showing the path of a particular celestial object (visible planets or the moon) for a given period of time.

Yesterday I had simply told him to document all of his attempts in the results and analysis part of his paper, so that even if he didn’t achieve it, at least he can show the panel all the work that he’s done.
This includes bringing copies of the earlier versions of his program so that the panel can see from themselves (if they wanted to) just how erroneously his initial trials performed.

At the back of my mind, I was already thinking that at least one, if not all, of my co-faculty in his panel will decline his request, not only because it’s been too long since his last defense that they won’t believe he hasn’t accomplished all of his objectives already, but also due to the fact that it’s not as unattainable as he’s making it out to be, as even his panelist who was my teacher in programming will tell him.

In case he did pass by when I wasn’t in the department when he showed up, I wrote down my argument against this request of his.

First of all, two previous astronomy-related theses have already proved that, from his main reference, the equations and program code in Pascal work. As long as he correctly converted them to visual basic, along with the proper and equivalent numeric variable types, they should give him no trouble.

Therefore, it must be a problem in his implementation of the tracing. But with that, all he has to do is, given a starting date and an ending date enter the first date in the function that computes the celestial body’s location. After getting the coordinates, he plots this on his view screen. Without clearing the screen, he increments the date (by one day, at least) and enters this in the position function again. He will repeat this procedure until he reaches the final date.

I compared it to plotting the equation y = f(x) for a given range of values for x. The result is a line or a curve, just that with the planets or the moon, it tracks their movement.

I’m hoping that this will clarify his idea of what his program is supposed to do with tracing.

He did pass by when I wasn’t in the department, at around 4pm. The secretary was able to give him my note, which also included two of my co-faculty’s evaluation and recommendations for his software. In return he left the letters he is supposed to give his panel about requesting for a date of defense. I don’t know if he made the second letter I told him about, but if he did, he didn’t leave it, maybe after reading the note that I left him.

At least, I told another of my co-teachers who I had dinner with tonight, to whom I lamented about the state of this student’s thesis, if the panel fails him in his orals in two weeks, he still has the whole of August to work on whatever revisions they may ask of him.

I just hope he remembers that he’s supposed to give his paper to the panel at least twenty-four hours before his scheduled defense, and that the final paper has to be approved by the adviser (that’s me!) for the defense to push through.