Qualifying Exam

Not bike related at all but just wanted to give a shout out that I just passed the most challenging exam so far. As luck would have it, the semester before I joined my current department, EAS, (Earth and Atmospheric Sciences) as new department policy was instituted, which is the Qualifying Exam. Interestingly enough, there had not been a weed-out process for graduate students entering the PhD program until the Preliminary Exam, which is late in the process to basically determine one should really not be in the program. Since it's a fairly new invention, committees have wide latitude with how to set up this exam. Some opt for the traditional set up where they give you an actual exam covering the material you should know to continue, both in written and oral form, others give you papers or book (chapters) to read. In my case, I was to give a presentation on a dissertation proposal. Basically a watered-down preliminary exam. After numerous bouts of schedulling and re-scheduling, I ended up giving the presentation and found out that if I did choose to continue doing all the things I presented I would be in school for another 10 years. Therefore a focus is now to take a year to delve a bit more and re-visit my goals. The challenging bit was to be able to switch from purely scientific questions to more "goal" oriented questions of which I, apparently, have too many. Overall, though, it was a great exam because I always feel that if I learned something through the experience, it was well worth it.