Saturday, October 02, 2004
My Qualifier Exams
In every graduate student's life there are certain things that he doesn't speak about (for further details look into "PhD- Piled Higher and Deeper".) In any case, the first amongst these are the PhD qualifier exams, otherwise known by names such as Doctoral Written Exams, Preliminary Exam, that stupid-thing-that-made-me-give-up-my-PhD and so on.
I had mine a couple of weeks ago. Now, having come from a Masters in Mechanical Engineering, life was a lot more complicated for me, with respect to my quals than for the more fortunate human beings who had been in Electrical Engineering all life long. This added to the confusion and being my nice procrastinating self, I decided to start preparing for this somewhere early in May. Alas, there is a difference between DECIDING to start and actually starting. I realized this somewhere in mid august (my exam was on September 15th) and decided that it was too late. So I let it go anyways. Somewhere around 2nd or 3rd of September, I decided to take a look at the past years' question papers. This is when it really struck me that I was not going to pass this thing. There was the usual feverish preparation for two days and before I knew it I had the exam in my hand.
After the exam was over, I had no clue about how difficult it was because I had no idea what I had done. Somehow the people around me seemed to think it was difficult so I decided that my best bet was to go along with that opinion, which is exactly what I did.
I really didn't know how it happened but somewhere around 3 days before the results were to be announced, I started thinking that maybe I could pass. THAT WAS BAD. Now there was this period of extreme tension, prayer and sleeplessness when I waited for the result. I have a theory that any PhD student spends 40% of his time waiting for his advisor and 60% of his time, running away from him. If this is true, I completed this years' forty percent worth waiting for him to do something about my qualifier result. The poor man must have got tired of seeing my face pop into his office each day asking him if he knew anything about the results.
Anyways I finally got my result yesterday and it seems that miracle of miracles, I passed !!! God be praised. That means that I am finally in here, a PhD student. Wow. That needs some time to sink in. In the meantime back to sleep.
ZZZzzzz.....
Naveen
I had mine a couple of weeks ago. Now, having come from a Masters in Mechanical Engineering, life was a lot more complicated for me, with respect to my quals than for the more fortunate human beings who had been in Electrical Engineering all life long. This added to the confusion and being my nice procrastinating self, I decided to start preparing for this somewhere early in May. Alas, there is a difference between DECIDING to start and actually starting. I realized this somewhere in mid august (my exam was on September 15th) and decided that it was too late. So I let it go anyways. Somewhere around 2nd or 3rd of September, I decided to take a look at the past years' question papers. This is when it really struck me that I was not going to pass this thing. There was the usual feverish preparation for two days and before I knew it I had the exam in my hand.
After the exam was over, I had no clue about how difficult it was because I had no idea what I had done. Somehow the people around me seemed to think it was difficult so I decided that my best bet was to go along with that opinion, which is exactly what I did.
I really didn't know how it happened but somewhere around 3 days before the results were to be announced, I started thinking that maybe I could pass. THAT WAS BAD. Now there was this period of extreme tension, prayer and sleeplessness when I waited for the result. I have a theory that any PhD student spends 40% of his time waiting for his advisor and 60% of his time, running away from him. If this is true, I completed this years' forty percent worth waiting for him to do something about my qualifier result. The poor man must have got tired of seeing my face pop into his office each day asking him if he knew anything about the results.
Anyways I finally got my result yesterday and it seems that miracle of miracles, I passed !!! God be praised. That means that I am finally in here, a PhD student. Wow. That needs some time to sink in. In the meantime back to sleep.
ZZZzzzz.....
Naveen
