Every time there is a PhD defense the department sends out a notification email. These notifications come out about a week before a student’s defense, and again on the student’s defense date. While two of these additional notifications were due to my defense, and a correction about the date, I wanted to see if this was an abnormal quarter of defenses. Now that things have settled down a bit, I decided to use my email as a record of defenses between 2008 and 2014 to measure when UCSD physics graduates defend.

A few years ago I saw a nice presentation of Whitmore’s academic geneology (his advisor, his advisor’s advisor, and so forth). Sometime in 2011, I scraped wikipedia for most of my tree, but never ended up making it presentable. More recently Darcy showed me hers, so I finally got around to making a nice graph representation of my tree. With the help of Agnieszka, I added some of the other UCSD professors that we scraped from wikipedia and random websites.