Renewal Processes - Advancement to Candidacy

Have you ever finished giving a 45 minute presentation and thought, "I wish I had more time"? I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, but at least my family said nice things. The advancement presentation is essentially a proposal for a PhD dissertation, meaning it has to touch on everything from background to preliminary results to evidence that future work will be successful. That's about two years of work plus a few more years beyond that, all in 45 minutes. The research itself was exciting and all, but looking back, this is when I discovered that research papers and presentations are best when they tell a story. My advisor is particularly good at being narrative driven, and its probably the part of this presentation that I'm most proud of. Well, that and the fact that I stopped using the default LaTeX beamer theme.