How to face the grad school exam that separates ‘student’ from ‘candidate’

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Some parts of graduate school have kept up with the times. Campuses modernize; hybrid learning abounds; and according to a Microsoft plugin I don’t remember installing, artificial intelligence is making everything better and we should all yield to its whims.

But some parts of grad school feel like they haven’t changed in decades or even centuries, and I’m not just talking about your stipend. There’s one particular part of grad school that has always felt downright, for lack of a better word, medieval. It’s a ritual you could picture happening in the halls of whatever passed for academia in dimly lit stone chambers, with everyone in heavy robes. And still, to this day, it’s fairly universal: the oral exam.

Some programs call them comps, or quals. At my school, we called them GBOs, graduate board orals, and they essentially constituted the dividing line between being given the thumbs-up to continue toward your Ph.D. after your first 2 years of course work and lab work or being asked to kindly slink toward the exit and pursue a career in the humanities.

Actually, there was a third option: “pass with conditions,” which—depending on the conditions—could be a sliver away from an unconditional pass, or potentially worse than a fail. I knew one student whose conditions required her to take a year’s worth of undergraduate chemistry courses that were probably, because of our university’s high concentration of overachieving premeds, much more rigorous than any graduate course. Another student had to meet with a committee member weekly for one-on-one review sessions. You might think the latter is easier than the former. But apparently, that professor was repeatedly unavailable during the time slots when he had scheduled the review sessions, leaving his student to wonder how she could fulfill the requirement he had created and then made impossible.

With all that at stake, it’s no surprise these exams are scary. And it doesn’t help that there’s a good chance you’ve never taken a test before in this type of format, standing in front of a panel of relaxed-looking professors and lecturing about science as if you’re a budding expert in your field, not a nervous grad student, answering questions spontaneously and competently—no “I’ll come back to this later” and flipping to the next page, no avoiding live, immediate judgment. Adding further to the pain, many scientists are introverts who chose this field precisely because they want to minimize human interaction.

If you find yourself freaking out because your school is forcing you to participate in the least entertaining type of performance art, hopefully you’ll find the following advice helpful.

Study efficiently and effectively.

Well, duh. Of course you should do this. But what makes studying effective? For me, I knew I would not only have to learn the material, but also train myself to recite and apply it out loud. And the only way to do that would be to understand it backward and forward. So I started a month in advance with a stack of blank paper, and I started to make study guides—vocabulary, chemical structures and mechanisms, graphs. Writing out the study guides forced me to relearn the material, and studying them reinforced it. Then I would hide them and see whether I could explain the same thing, out loud, to an imaginary thesis committee. The imaginary committee was very forgiving.

Study what the committee is likely to ask.

This is challenging, because they can literally ask you questions about all of science. But don’t try to study all of science. You already know they will probably ask about your specific research project, so start there. Know your project well. Read and understand the most important papers and reviews. Then broaden your reach: Study the fields that pertain to your research. I worked on the binding kinetics of particular enzymes in the parasite that causes malaria, so I reviewed the basics of kinetics, the basics of malaria, and the scientific principles behind all of the machines and assays I used in the lab. Think like your committee: If you were assessing a Ph.D. candidate who measured one kind of kinetics every day, wouldn’t it be logical to ask them about different kinds of kinetics? I must have reread the kinetics chapter of my biochemistry textbook a dozen times to prepare for my exam, and guess what, the committee asked me a bunch of questions about kinetics.

Seed your studying with a zinger or two.

It’s impossible to predict all possible questions your committee might ask. But you can keep an eye open for a few, and prepare accordingly. For me, that approach happened to pay off. Without going into too much detail, almost all the enzymes I worked with were aspartic proteases, which are a pretty standard kind of enzyme, and it’s well-known how they work. But one was a histo-aspartic protease, which was so rare that the name of the enzyme was literally “histo-aspartic protease,” and no one knew its mechanism. It occurred to me while studying that a clever question might be to ask me to draw out how a histo-aspartic protease might work, in theory, from basic chemical principles. I will readily confess that I could not have figured this out on the spot—but I didn’t need to, because I figured it out in advance and then memorized the answer. Sure enough, my committee asked me that exact question, and I had to hide my glee when I pretended to think for a moment, then wrote the answer perfectly. “Maybe … like this?” I said, while thinking, “Damn right it’s like this.”

But don’t neglect the basic basics.

Somehow, in my studying, I had assumed I would just kind of remember all of organic chemistry. Oops. At one point, my committee asked me to draw a molecule and show them where the resonance could be found. That’s, like, week one stuff in organic chemistry. But week one was 4 years earlier, and I totally blanked. I only remembered that “resonance equals dotted lines,” and I think I drew some dotted lines.

Choose your committee wisely.

You might think your committee should consist of professors in your exact field. And you should definitely include some of those if you can. But there’s another criterion that I think people often forget: You should ensure that your committee includes nice people. We had one professor in my department who probably conducted more orals than anyone else, not because his knowledge extended into their fields, but because he was a nice, forgiving guy who didn’t try to trip anyone up. Conversely, we had another professor who was young and untenured, and rumor had it that he would always try to find fault with students as a way to prove his own worth to the other committee members. The makeup of your committee can truly mean the difference between a positive experience and a nightmare, a pass and a fail. It may seem arbitrary and unfair, but that’s only because it’s arbitrary and unfair.

Don’t get discouraged.

One of the hardest facts for me to accept was that the committee’s job is to find the limits of your knowledge. If they only ask you questions that you can easily answer, they won’t know what you really know. Practically, this means they may ask a question, see the relief on your face as you start to confidently respond, and then immediately switch to a different topic. It also means they will end up asking you a bunch of questions that will baffle you and make you think you should have chosen a different field. It means you will end your orals believing you failed, and why not, because there’s so much you don’t know.

That’s how I felt exiting that room. I finished my 90-minute grilling and entered the hallway, ready to collapse. My lab mate was waiting there to hand me a beer, a little tradition in our lab. His congratulations felt bittersweet because I knew, knew, I had screwed up. At best, I would pass with conditions, and I just had to hope those conditions would be reasonable.

Then the door opened, and one by one, the committee members exited and shook my hand. Even then, I still thought they were going to deliver bad news. When they started to walk out of the building, I wondered whether I should schedule a second session to review what I assumed would be some pretty onerous conditions.

But no. I passed unconditionally, though the committee did note—correctly—that I should probably take some time to rereview organic chemistry.

As I stood there in the hallway, holding my laptop and the bottle of beer, I just kept thinking I should have failed. Toward the end, I had answered so many questions with a deflated “I don’t know.” There was just so much I didn’t know.

Of course, there was so much I didn’t know. Yet.

That’s why I was here.

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