Grad School PhD Success Celebration, COVID-style

Post date: 2021-04-20 04:54:44

My husband is finally about to finish his CS PhD after seven-ish long, long years. I want this to be feted appropriately, but it's been a terrible year for celebrations, and I have no idea what to do!

It's been a tough year for us in terms of big milestone events. We canceled our wedding and got zoom-married instead. We figured we'd save the wedding money and buy a house instead and have a reception in our future yard at some later date, and of course the housing market is completely wild right now so that feels like a dim possibility as well. It would be really nice to knock one of these things out of the park instead of losing all the nice moments to COVID.

I'm trying to think of things that feel acceptably big for such a huge milestone. It's also genuinely been an incredibly taxing process on us both. (who knew grad school would be tough, right? haha) We've had plenty of bad feelings tied up in the PhD over the years, but dang it, I want thi We're getting our second Pfizer shots in a few days, but I don't think we have any big travel in the cards yet or anything like that. If this was normal times, I'd probably plan a weekend trip to the city and one extremely expensive dinner, and we might actually still do this... later! But I really want to do something at the actual moment to celebrate this huge accomplishment and really mark the ending of a huge chapter of our lives.

We do have tentative plans to go camping when he is truly done, not sure when as his defense date isn't yet scheduled. It would definitely be cool to sneak some stuff on this trip to surprise him with, but beyond maybe a fancy bottle of champagne I'm not sure what!

General interests are mountain biking, computer stuff (his PhD is in supercomputing), video games, he's really excited to start learning Korean when he has more free time. We're both getting more and more outdoors-oriented so some cool camping stuff might be extremely fitting but I don't know enough to know what could be cool!

Please click Here to read the full story.