On Tuesday, I became a PhD candidate. If you're not familiar with the process (I certainly wasn't until well into grad school), when you start your PhD, you are a "PhD student" until you complete your candidacy exams. For me, this involved a 3-hour oral exam with four examiners, one chair, and my two supervisors who were only allowed to observe. We did this all online (because Covid). Each examiner had sent me readings earlier in the semester. The amount ranged from five papers from one examiner to three textbooks, two theses, and a couple of papers from another (the other two gave me somewhere in between that amount). During the exam, each examiner had 15 minutes to question me on the materials covered in the readings, followed be a second round of questioning afterwards. There's a lot of things I didn't know about these exams (and still might not totally be right), so I'm going to tell you what I've learned over the past few months:
Candidacy exams = comprehensive exams ("comps") = qualifying exams ("quals")... more or less. It seems to differ greatly by university. Some will have you do a written exam, others you do an oral/live exam, and some make you do written AND oral. Some will have you do a presentation beforehand, others will not.
Because each university does it a little bit differently, if you ask friends from other universities for advice, realize that their experience and the expectations of their program may be wildly different from yours!
You're going to be reading a LOT! No matter which university you are at or who your examiners are, expect to be reading more than you've ever read before. I'll give some advice on this later on.
The exam is going to fly by. Each time of the examiners' time was up I was surprised it'd already been 15 minutes.
You're not going to know the answer to every question. Or maybe you won't give the answer they're looking for on the first try. Most examiners will help you get to the answer that they're looking for. The purpose of this process is to find out what is the limit of your knowledge. They may keep pushing until you finally say "I don't know". It's okay to say you don't know.
This isn't so much as test of memorization as it is a test of your understanding. However, I did have a couple of questions like, "Define X and Y" or "Name the three methods to do XYZ..." that were very much based on what I had memorized from the readings. I wasn't really expecting to get those types of questions, and had thought they would be more general, like "Describe how you might do XYZ...".
Some advice:
Take good notes while you're reading.
Organize and track your readings so you know how much you've done and how much you have left.
Create practice questions while you're working through the readings.
Be prepared to read things twice (and some things more). Or, if you take good notes, then read your notes multiple times. Unless you have a fantastic memory - I don't.
Draw out concepts that you are trying to commit to memory.
Google or look on YouTube for explanations of concepts that are tricky to understand. There are lots of great resources out there.
Ask friends or labmates to help you come up with questions.
If you have anyone in your lab or university that has done their exams in your department, ask them for advice.
Do practice comps/QEs. Ask your labmates to read a paper or two from your readings and quiz you. This will help you gauge how prepared you are, and give you some ideas of where to review.
Practice answering questions out loud. I did this a lot while driving. I gave my fiancé a list of practice questions for him to read out in a voice message, then I listened to this message and answered the questions out loud while driving.
Advice from a friend: take breaks. Do something fun or relaxing every evening. I played lots of Wingspan or went for evening walks.
Get lots of sleep, eat well, and don't skip out on exercise. I ended up getting sick twice in the month before my exams. I almost had to postpone them. I attribute this to all the extra stress leading up to this big exam.
Enjoy the process. This was the one big piece of advice from my supervisors, and I totally agree with it. Enjoy curling up on your couch with a cup of tea and your cat, and reading for hours. I learned SO MUCH in such a short time.
Enjoy the exam too. As much as it's stressful, it's also kind of exciting and fun. As much as I was incredibly nervous, there were moments where I felt relaxed, comfortable, and confident.
Celebrate when you're done. No matter what the outcome is, it's a lot of work to prepare for these, so completing these exams is a huge accomplishment. Don't focus on the questions you didn't know how to answer, focus on the ones you did answer (this is 100% advice to myself, right now).
For more advice, check out my friend, Rick Simpson's blog post on preparing for your comps here.
One of the biggest surprises for me was that I finished it and felt like, "Geez, I spent four months reading and preparing for this and they barely scratched the surface of all the stuff I learned!!" Part of me was disappointed that it ended so soon and that I didn't get a chance to prove that I understood certain concepts or could draw connections between different components of the readings. But I was also so relieved when it was done. It felt like a huge weight lifted off of me. In the end, I realize that the exam isn't really the important part, it's all the readings and everything you learn as you prepare that's important. The exam is just the finale.
