Prelims
Hopefully by this time tomorrow I will be celebrating my status as a qualified PhD candidate. Of course, you don't officially hear for another couple of weeks, but... I think you can basically tell if you've passed your prelims or not. In the 20+ year history of my lab, not one student has failed, which either means 1) big pressure not to be the first or 2) Bob sticks up for you. Yesterday at my "practice prelim," which ended up being more like "an enumeration all of the things Holly should know, i.e. the entirety of biology" Bob seemed to have some pretty high expectations, but... we'll see. I think how I do will depend a lot on how far discussion veers from my project, which is somewhat under my control.
People say that part of the point of prelims is to understand that you really don't know very much. Certainly the mutability of "facts" is brought to the light when you read a paper in 2005 saying that CED-4 forms a tetramer that binds CED-3 with its caspase recruitment domains and then a paper from the same people in 2010 saying that, j/k, it's an octomer and actually the caspase recruitment domains are kind of floating around in a place far from CED-3. And, the idea that you should know everything related to your topic in fine detail starts to become absurd when you realize that "related to your topic" encompasses a good deal of cancer, development, signaling pathways, neurodegenerative diseases, immunity, cell movement, genetic techniques, biochemistry techniques, worm biology, history/methodology of various discoveries, similarities and difference between different processes in various organisms, gene expression, degradation, etc etc. And then you should be able to show breadth of knowledge as well, so if you weren't already being held accountable for almost all biology, then I guess you are now. So yes, I'm highly aware that, of the material I should know, I know basically nothing, because the limit of any finite number divided by x goes to zero as x goes to infinity. Check me off for that goal of the qualification process.
But really I think the point of prelims is to have a checkpoint-- not that turns people away if they don't pass, but that ensures that everyone is at some basic level before they progress. And certainly, having an exam is a good way to make sure that students are thinking more broadly about their project, getting motivation (extrinsic, if nothing else) to study the literature, and practicing speaking to an audience about science and answering questions that may or may not be obvious. My to-read list shot up from about 50 papers at the beginning of summer to a steady state of around 200 papers, where it stays mostly constant because each new bit of information demands new areas of understanding to go with it. And so whether or not I actually pass tomorrow, I think I have met some of the goals of the prelim process and at least made significant gains in my understanding of some important biology, so that's good.
I really do like giving talks, and I do like teaching-- so I'm trying to reframe the prelim experience in my mind from "an exam in which experts quiz you" to "a chance to talk about some biology I find interesting and teach them what I know," ignoring for the moment that they probably know it better than I do already. I often got some pretty bizarre, tangential questions from students in genetics last year, so when I think of it in this way, I feel prepared.
People say that part of the point of prelims is to understand that you really don't know very much. Certainly the mutability of "facts" is brought to the light when you read a paper in 2005 saying that CED-4 forms a tetramer that binds CED-3 with its caspase recruitment domains and then a paper from the same people in 2010 saying that, j/k, it's an octomer and actually the caspase recruitment domains are kind of floating around in a place far from CED-3. And, the idea that you should know everything related to your topic in fine detail starts to become absurd when you realize that "related to your topic" encompasses a good deal of cancer, development, signaling pathways, neurodegenerative diseases, immunity, cell movement, genetic techniques, biochemistry techniques, worm biology, history/methodology of various discoveries, similarities and difference between different processes in various organisms, gene expression, degradation, etc etc. And then you should be able to show breadth of knowledge as well, so if you weren't already being held accountable for almost all biology, then I guess you are now. So yes, I'm highly aware that, of the material I should know, I know basically nothing, because the limit of any finite number divided by x goes to zero as x goes to infinity. Check me off for that goal of the qualification process.
But really I think the point of prelims is to have a checkpoint-- not that turns people away if they don't pass, but that ensures that everyone is at some basic level before they progress. And certainly, having an exam is a good way to make sure that students are thinking more broadly about their project, getting motivation (extrinsic, if nothing else) to study the literature, and practicing speaking to an audience about science and answering questions that may or may not be obvious. My to-read list shot up from about 50 papers at the beginning of summer to a steady state of around 200 papers, where it stays mostly constant because each new bit of information demands new areas of understanding to go with it. And so whether or not I actually pass tomorrow, I think I have met some of the goals of the prelim process and at least made significant gains in my understanding of some important biology, so that's good.
I really do like giving talks, and I do like teaching-- so I'm trying to reframe the prelim experience in my mind from "an exam in which experts quiz you" to "a chance to talk about some biology I find interesting and teach them what I know," ignoring for the moment that they probably know it better than I do already. I often got some pretty bizarre, tangential questions from students in genetics last year, so when I think of it in this way, I feel prepared.