A post-prelim perspective
November 26th, 2007Here at Michigan, EEB graduate students go through qualifying exams (colloquially called “prelims,” or “paper, seminar, and oral”) in the fall of their second year. Prelims “start” when the paper is due (Oct 12th this year), and they must be completely finished by Thanksgiving.
I finished up my prelims on November 9th and was the second student to finish in my cohort out of 13 total. Finishing early is nothing fancy; prelims are simply done based on the schedules of the student and their evaluating committee. Due to my own travel commitments (I just spent 10 days in Spain and London) and the external activities of my advisor, November 9th was the last day I could finish my prelims.
As a first year, I knew prelims were coming, and I tried to prepare for them. But it is difficult to prepare for an omnipresent review of everything you know. I did some reading, especially of classic papers (Foundations of Ecology is a super helpful collection of ecology papers that I recommend to every incoming EEB student). Especially difficult is the fact that prelims are an amorphous challenge; during the orals, professors can ask you anything within the realm of science. I definitely fielded a question or two about the general history of science and scientific reasoning.
Previous second years warned me that prelims were stressful. Of course, I acknowledged this, but I never realized how stressful they can be. Again, much of the stress of prelims comes from the unknown of orals. You can prepare your paper and presentation with plenty of time to refine and finesse. But there is literally no way to know every single subject within EEB, biology, and science in general. What is important is to know what you know and acknowledge when you don’t know enough to answer a question.
Prelims are also time-consuming. Much of the time consumption comes from reading and preparing. I don’t even want to think about how many pages of literature I’ve read over the last several months. More time comes from attending the seminars of your cohort mates in a show of solidarity and mutual support.
Now that prelims are done, I do feel a bit relieved. I’ve cleared one major hurdle to my PhD (and I find out this week which parts I passed and which parts will need to be redone or revised). But, mostly, I am excited to focus in on my research and prepare my dissertation proposal. And I am also starting to see that grad school is a series of challenges punctuated by periods of less intensity rather than simply being a downward slope from prelims.
The final take-home message, I suppose, is that prelims weren’t really that bad. I spent a solid year dreading, looking forward to, fearing, preparing for, and anticipating my prelims. And now they’re done. And hopefully, I’ll have a bit more time to share my scientific ideas rather than confining my thoughts to jots in the margins of literature or scribbles on an index card.




