What's in Store: PhD, EMBC, and JHU

I have effectively logged out from this blog, most social activities, and private life in general in the last weeks and months.
This is a result of a whole cloud of different tasks floating around me in a very non-structured manner, soaking up all available energy.

• Aug 1:
  The most urgent task right now (and thus the most intensively tackled, according to the Earliest-Deadline-First scheduling paradigm) is finishing the pre-final version of my PhD thesis and handing it in to my supervisor.
  


• Aug:
  Right after that, a huge amount of miscellaneous stuff needs to be dealt with, all related to finishing and closing up a 6-year DFG-funded project, applying for follow-up project funding, packing my stuff at the UBT, and moving out of Germany, including handling all the official, organizational, and private matters.
  


• Aug 16-26:
  Second, it's the next conference where part of my (and my project partners') work is to be presented, in Vancouver, Canada. It will be a huge conference (the 30th EMBC), with an appropriately high pressure to whip up a good presentation. What's more, there'll be my next supervisor (for my post-PhD time work) giving a workshop talk, which gives the whole thing added value (and added pressure).
  Besides, I still need to find out whether I can postpone the Canadian Permanent Residency activation to some time later this year, or early next year. This would relieve me of a lot of organizational stuff at the time of landing now.
  


• Sep 15:
  Scheduled beginning of my next work appointment. Completely unexpectedly, the one of my bunch of applications I had sent out several months ago - in frightened anticipation of the time after my current PhD-research assistant appointment at the UBT - which fired and blossomed into a work contract is at the place I had expected the least.
  A telephone interview with Russell H. Taylor and Emad Boctor of the ERC-CISST at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD/USA scored me a visiting student (at first) and postdoc (after PhD graduation) position there. It'll last one year, and encompasses work on an ultrasound-related project in cooperation with a German Fraunhofer institute.
  Needless to say, I am more frightened of this assignment, in this lab, with these faculty, and these people, than I was when I had no appointment in the pipeline at all.
  

The other week, I had the absolutely fantastic and unique opportunity to meet Prof. Taylor here in Germany, and discuss the pending project work and spend some personal time with him. I learned a lot about the ROBODOC, life in robotics, academia, and especially in JHU (and here), which I could not have learned anywhere else.

Now I hope I can live up to the expectations. Which are high. Needless to say.