It was a long night for Casey Malarcher.
Malarcher, a graduate student and Ph.D. candidate, began defending his doctoral dissertation last Thursday at 2 a.m. from Seoul, South Korea.
Malarcher said this is the first UNM Web conference that has reached three continents, and the first where the candidate has been outside the United States.
In Albuquerque, it was 11 a.m. and seven members of Malarcher's dissertation committee gathered in Hokona Hall to watch Malarcher's presentation and to ask questions about his research.
Malarcher's dissertation, "Four Cases of Adaptation: Korean Students Reflect on the Process of Adaptation to Life and Studying at an American University," analyzed, through case studies, Korean students and their experiences adjusting to new cultures with special attention to culture shock.
"I really wanted to get the participant perspective on the cultural distance," Malarcher said. "I was paying attention to conscious changes, to get the main differences between the two cultures from the participant's point of view."
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According to the dissertation, participants were interviewed about their personal experiences adjusting to student life. Malarcher took the data from the experiences and wrote what he called a "biographical monologue" for each participant.
The defense lasted about two hours.
Malarcher said he moved to South Korea a few years ago due to family obligations.
"Luckily, I had just finished collecting all the data for my research, so I came to Korea with all that and wrote the dissertation here," Malarcher said.
There are three ways a doctoral student can defend his or her dissertation: in person, by teleconference and by Web conference.
Malarcher said he did not choose the long-distance defense format, it just worked out that way.
"It is kind of hard for me to take time off just to fly back to Albuquerque for a one-hour defense," he said. "Thankfully, the chair of my committee was willing to try this format. For someone like me, it is saving both time and money."
A Web conference is an option available to all students, as long as the committee says it's acceptable.
A Web conference may have been convenient, but a few technical difficulties Thursday morning made things a little more stressful.
"We did a practice run with all of the technology two days prior, and everything worked like a charm," Malarcher said. "But then the day of the defense, nothing seemed to work right."
Associate professor and chairman of the dissertation committee Holbrook Mahn agreed, saying things Thursday morning could have run more smoothly.
The Web conference format has been available to UNM students for a while, but Mahn said he prefers having the candidate there in person.
"Ideally you want them right there," he said. "When you aren't seeing a person, you are missing certain communication that is taking place, spoken and unspoken. It is more complete if it is face to face."
Malarcher said his dissertation was approved pending some revisions to his work.
He added it is a hassle to mail the paperwork back and forth.
"Even though defending has taken a step into the 21st century, other parts of the process have not," he said.
