5 ms·

My PhD qualifying exam was a nightmare but I'm not letting it define me

18 points by bkohlmann 4y ago

syzarian 4y ago
I passed Ph.D. qualifying exams in mathematics after failing them the first time. Almost everyone in my family has a college degree and this fact helped me not one bit since none of them can understand graduate level mathematics. Being a first generation college student is not an excuse for doing poorly on Ph.D. qualifying exams. You know the material or you don’t and it’s highly unlikely people in your family will relate to that specific set of knowledge. Sounds to me like the author doesn’t know the material well enough. Take the hint and change careers.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- lumost 4y ago
  These exams seem somewhat silly in my view. If a professor believes one is capable of research, and one has built relationships/track record with the professors through coursework. Then why would the university fail out a student on an oral examination? It seems like using leetcode to determine promotions.
  - xwolfi 4y ago
    Because a single professor sponsorship is not good enough for such a degree. But why do a PhD if you dont like the rules, I dont have one and I'm happy, productive, married, rich enough... The problem with leetcode is that it favors leet coders, but if that s what a company wants Ill apologize and say Im a dumb average dev who cant cast arrays into integers in javascript on the top of my head or whatnot, and move on.
  - syzarian 4y ago
    Professors have motivations beyond ensuring that the a potential student is capable. For instance, sometimes they need bodies to pad resumes or look good for a promotions committee. A person with a Ph.D. should have an expert level of knowledge in their field. If a student can’t pass an examination after 3 tries then, in my opinion, it’s time to move on. Would you want as your ER doctor someone who couldn’t pass the USMLE? At some point one has to be able to prove they know material like you and I know 1+1 is 2.
- nigamanth 4y ago
  Exactly, maybe the examination is a sign. I get the fact that circumstances can change maybe 1 examination, but 3 times in a row? You should be doing the doctorate because it interests you, to select a career you need something that interests you, something that you're good at, and something that pays. Going to the career for only one of them isn't good enough.
slavboj 4y ago
Indeed, failing quals doesn't define her - as you can see from her resume and works like this, it's far more important she is "an Afro-Latinx first-generation college graduate". I'm sure she will go on to enjoy immense professional success.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ramraj07 4y ago
The author is absolutely correct that the ability to pass the PhD qualifying exam should not define them as a person or their self worth. A PhD is just a different career choice not very dissimilar to becoming a musician. But the qualifying exam sounded like it did its job the way it was supposed to! The author was given multiple opportunities to pass a fairly clear bar of academic competence to hold the highest and thus the most difficult to attain qualification in the world, and they failed every time. From how it’s written I see no indication of prejudice due to their gender or ethnicity, or of any wrong doing. They were just not good enough at doing what was expected of them at this stage. Arguments such as “they asked questions outside of my topic” sound moot because that’s the expectation here! You’re supposed to have a reasonable breadth of knowledge in your field! And now if someone asked a question you had never thought about, that’s unfair? For a PhD qualifying exam? I’m not blaming the author for any of this though, the pattern and idea that a PhD should be achievable by anyone regardless of their intellectual abilities has been taking root for a long time coming. The professors don’t want to fight it because this is the only way they get free cheap labor, except when they lament about in the drop in abilities in the new generation. I also don’t completely buy into the narrative that educated families make a difference in your PhD performance. The only corollary is succeeding in a PhD typically correlated with how _stable_ your personal life is. Privilege in socioeconomic terms that provides safety nets and support systems absolutely do make a large difference and should be afforded to all the candidates. But even if your dad had a PhD, unless it’s in the exact same topic, nobody’s getting help practicing for their quals. it’s saddening but was inevitable that institutions would just do away with important requirements than fight with such appeals but given my general disdain for present day academia, I’m excited to see where the whole system goes as more such nails are driven into its coffin.
- wahern 4y ago
  Yeah, it's one thing for a kid unfamiliar with rigorous academic culture to be shell shocked during undergraduate school. I certainly was, and it was a long slog for me with plenty of scars and a below average academic record to show for it. (And as not a member of a favored minority group, the system was much more merciless--you don't get the benefit of white privilege at those elite levels unless you can at least walk and talk the part, and from those heights there's nary a difference between poor black or latino kids and poor white kids in terms of how they come across, and plenty of minority students who could play the part much better than I ever could.) But by the time you hit graduate school the rules of the game are clear; even if you're still not proficient in understanding how you're supposed to approach and regurgitate the material, the expectations should be abundantly clear, as well as the dilemmas academia faces which motivate those rules. Perhaps the problem here is that her undergraduate program had already been watered down too much, which is particularly shameful for a program in the hard sciences. My studies were on the other half of campus--liberal arts and then the law, the requirements of which are in some ways more inscrutable, but admittedly often less rigorous, at least in undergraduate. FWIW, I often don't do well with scholarly vocabulary, either. I often like to do deep dives into historical material, and the vocabulary shifts over time, even over the course of a decade or less. So while I was often much more well read than any other student, I'd often use terms with more archaic definitions in mind, which could make me sound like an imbecile. (Ditto regarding concepts as the textbook delineations are always fuzzier for me having read various primary sources which progressed across time to give a concept it's modern shape. I understood that modern shape, but it takes so much more effort to articulate clearly as you're struggling to suppress and mask out the inherent complexity.) I'm also a stutterer, which means I often sound like an imbecile from the first moment someone hears me stutter.
sn41 4y ago
> I even stopped doing lab work to focus on my exam preparations. This is the main drawback of the qualifier circus. PhD students waste 2-3 years preparing for this arbitrary and nightmarish rite of passage, time that they could have started their research. I am glad that that particular department decided to do away with the exam. It is better to define a subset of core courses, and just use the GPA in these courses as a qualifier for formal admission into PhD candidacy. This will help the students gain the candidacy in parallel with the coursework rather than sink enormous amounts of additional time into an exam.
- tsbischof 4y ago
  Hard disagree on dropping quals. Quals were one of the only times where we were forced challenged to reexamine our ideas from a reasonably outside perspective, both to see that we actually knew the material and that we could work outside our little niche. This also happens in the group, at conferences, etc but quals are one of the only institutional opportunities to enforce outside perspective. Part of the point of the PhD is learning how to approach problems that have no established solution, and someone who lacks breadth or depth will likely find it challenging to be a professional researcher.
agileAlligator 4y ago
What was the point of this article? To save everyone a click, the author failed the qualifying exam for the PhD program thrice and got kicked out. Article ends with her advisor petitioning for her to be reinstated to the program.
- dangus 4y ago
  Agreed, I'm sure it was a difficult experience and I can empathize with that, but there's just no real takeaway.
frankc 4y ago
I am really curious what the person writing this article thinks people will take away from it is. You failed three oral exams but were let through anyway because meritocracy has gone of out of fashion. Ok. I guess the article is just a slice of life piece for this magazine but its almost like it was generated by a right-wing ragebait factory to drum up racial tensions and anti-academic sentiment.
DevKoala 4y ago
The bar wasn’t lowered, it was removed altogether.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
selfhifive 4y ago
First the unrelated concepts argument. It's generally hard to know if a concept is related to your research without understanding it or knowing about it. Then there's the dunning kruger effect where we overestimate our own abilities. It's likely that there was a tangential link and the author failed to see it. Ironically her failure to see the relation possibly led to a poor impression. The argument of not having family members to talk about research is absurd because you always have some colleagues talking shop. The language argument fails because every year many immigrant students with English as a second language take the same exams and do well.
light_hue_1 4y ago
I got my PhD from a department with a strict qualifying exam (less than 50% pass rate). It was a tragic system that served no purpose. There were dozens of students who were clearly able to do research. Who had publications in top tier conferences and journals. But they had difficulties passing the qualifying exam (exams were based on courses which changed all the time, it was easy to be extremely good at say computer architecture but get a few oddball questions out in left field about some minutia you've never seen before). The real consequence of the system was that it discriminated against people who didn't understand it. You had to know to pick the right classes, to time it for the right year (where enough senior faculty had students who needed to pass it ASAP so that it would be easier). And of course, senior faculty with connections pulled strings to get their students past the exam. At my university now we thankfully don't do this insanity. Qualifying for the PhD is what it is supposed to be: can you publish? Ok, then show us a publication and defend it. Now let's talk about what you'll be doing for the rest of your PhD.
dumpsterdiver 4y ago
I found myself thinking it was strange that a domain named science.org would have so many ads, as if it were some sacred place where only learning is allowed to happen. I realized that wasn't a realistic expectation. I feel like this is an appropriate time to humbly present my easily auditable Chrome plugin that only toggles javascript (globally / every tab), and nothing more. It literally has one job, and that may not work for everyone. If you're in the habit of leaving unsaved work in background tabs then this extension probably isn't for you. It really will disable javascript on every tab. For browsing random javascript heavy sites though, I find it to be very useful. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/js-toggle/bnhjfamolmolljikdopibpabimjfellc https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/js-toggle/bnhjfamo...
runeblaze 4y ago
The comments here are too harsh. The emotional journey of failing high stakes exams and the helplessness of the closest people around you not knowing what it feels like is such an emotional roller-coaster. I mean, I failed too many technical interviews last year, and I am still heavily drained by that. Let's have more empathy to the author. 99% of us could all have bad streaks of exams/interviewing/fundraising rounds at some point in our life. Let's not let these setbacks define us.
loveparade 4y ago
I don't understand how "Black Lives Matter" and "BlackInTheIvory" is related to the content of this all. Why is this in there? This reads like it was generated by ChatGPT with "Write a sad story about PhD qualifying exams but sprinkle in references to social movements about racial inequality"
jdkee 4y ago
To add insult to injury, the job market for humanities PhDs has cratered. See https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/higher-ed-gamma/what-should-we-do-about-undergrads-who-want-pursue-humanities-doctorate https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/higher-ed-gamma/what-sh...
rmk 4y ago
Remarkably content-free article written by a thrice-rejected newly accepted PhD candidate at Northeastern University. What does this article seek to do? Does it Persuade? About what? Inform? That the author is a 'first-generation Afro-Latinx'? Check. That the bar was the same as every other one of the hundreds of grad schools in the nation, and then it was removed, so she can now proceed to research and the final defense? Check. It is of course not true in general, but I feel that it is now de rigueur for authors to inject race and hyphenated identities into practically everything they write, sadly reducing them to caricatures. It is difficult to take such writing seriously.

18 points by bkohlmann 4y ago

I passed Ph.D. qualifying exams in mathematics after failing them the first time. Almost everyone in my family has a college degree and this fact helped me not one bit since none of them can understand graduate level mathematics. Being a first generation college student is not an excuse for doing poorly on Ph.D. qualifying exams. You know the material or you don’t and it’s highly unlikely people in your family will relate to that specific set of knowledge. Sounds to me like the author doesn’t know the material well enough. Take the hint and change careers.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lumost 4y ago
These exams seem somewhat silly in my view. If a professor believes one is capable of research, and one has built relationships/track record with the professors through coursework. Then why would the university fail out a student on an oral examination? It seems like using leetcode to determine promotions.
- xwolfi 4y ago
  Because a single professor sponsorship is not good enough for such a degree. But why do a PhD if you dont like the rules, I dont have one and I'm happy, productive, married, rich enough... The problem with leetcode is that it favors leet coders, but if that s what a company wants Ill apologize and say Im a dumb average dev who cant cast arrays into integers in javascript on the top of my head or whatnot, and move on.
- syzarian 4y ago
  Professors have motivations beyond ensuring that the a potential student is capable. For instance, sometimes they need bodies to pad resumes or look good for a promotions committee. A person with a Ph.D. should have an expert level of knowledge in their field. If a student can’t pass an examination after 3 tries then, in my opinion, it’s time to move on. Would you want as your ER doctor someone who couldn’t pass the USMLE? At some point one has to be able to prove they know material like you and I know 1+1 is 2.
nigamanth 4y ago
Exactly, maybe the examination is a sign. I get the fact that circumstances can change maybe 1 examination, but 3 times in a row? You should be doing the doctorate because it interests you, to select a career you need something that interests you, something that you're good at, and something that pays. Going to the career for only one of them isn't good enough.

slavboj 4y ago

Indeed, failing quals doesn't define her - as you can see from her resume and works like this, it's far more important she is "an Afro-Latinx first-generation college graduate". I'm sure she will go on to enjoy immense professional success.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

ramraj07 4y ago

The author is absolutely correct that the ability to pass the PhD qualifying exam should not define them as a person or their self worth. A PhD is just a different career choice not very dissimilar to becoming a musician. But the qualifying exam sounded like it did its job the way it was supposed to! The author was given multiple opportunities to pass a fairly clear bar of academic competence to hold the highest and thus the most difficult to attain qualification in the world, and they failed every time. From how it’s written I see no indication of prejudice due to their gender or ethnicity, or of any wrong doing. They were just not good enough at doing what was expected of them at this stage. Arguments such as “they asked questions outside of my topic” sound moot because that’s the expectation here! You’re supposed to have a reasonable breadth of knowledge in your field! And now if someone asked a question you had never thought about, that’s unfair? For a PhD qualifying exam? I’m not blaming the author for any of this though, the pattern and idea that a PhD should be achievable by anyone regardless of their intellectual abilities has been taking root for a long time coming. The professors don’t want to fight it because this is the only way they get free cheap labor, except when they lament about in the drop in abilities in the new generation. I also don’t completely buy into the narrative that educated families make a difference in your PhD performance. The only corollary is succeeding in a PhD typically correlated with how _stable_ your personal life is. Privilege in socioeconomic terms that provides safety nets and support systems absolutely do make a large difference and should be afforded to all the candidates. But even if your dad had a PhD, unless it’s in the exact same topic, nobody’s getting help practicing for their quals. it’s saddening but was inevitable that institutions would just do away with important requirements than fight with such appeals but given my general disdain for present day academia, I’m excited to see where the whole system goes as more such nails are driven into its coffin.

wahern 4y ago
Yeah, it's one thing for a kid unfamiliar with rigorous academic culture to be shell shocked during undergraduate school. I certainly was, and it was a long slog for me with plenty of scars and a below average academic record to show for it. (And as not a member of a favored minority group, the system was much more merciless--you don't get the benefit of white privilege at those elite levels unless you can at least walk and talk the part, and from those heights there's nary a difference between poor black or latino kids and poor white kids in terms of how they come across, and plenty of minority students who could play the part much better than I ever could.) But by the time you hit graduate school the rules of the game are clear; even if you're still not proficient in understanding how you're supposed to approach and regurgitate the material, the expectations should be abundantly clear, as well as the dilemmas academia faces which motivate those rules. Perhaps the problem here is that her undergraduate program had already been watered down too much, which is particularly shameful for a program in the hard sciences. My studies were on the other half of campus--liberal arts and then the law, the requirements of which are in some ways more inscrutable, but admittedly often less rigorous, at least in undergraduate. FWIW, I often don't do well with scholarly vocabulary, either. I often like to do deep dives into historical material, and the vocabulary shifts over time, even over the course of a decade or less. So while I was often much more well read than any other student, I'd often use terms with more archaic definitions in mind, which could make me sound like an imbecile. (Ditto regarding concepts as the textbook delineations are always fuzzier for me having read various primary sources which progressed across time to give a concept it's modern shape. I understood that modern shape, but it takes so much more effort to articulate clearly as you're struggling to suppress and mask out the inherent complexity.) I'm also a stutterer, which means I often sound like an imbecile from the first moment someone hears me stutter.

sn41 4y ago

> I even stopped doing lab work to focus on my exam preparations. This is the main drawback of the qualifier circus. PhD students waste 2-3 years preparing for this arbitrary and nightmarish rite of passage, time that they could have started their research. I am glad that that particular department decided to do away with the exam. It is better to define a subset of core courses, and just use the GPA in these courses as a qualifier for formal admission into PhD candidacy. This will help the students gain the candidacy in parallel with the coursework rather than sink enormous amounts of additional time into an exam.

tsbischof 4y ago
Hard disagree on dropping quals. Quals were one of the only times where we were forced challenged to reexamine our ideas from a reasonably outside perspective, both to see that we actually knew the material and that we could work outside our little niche. This also happens in the group, at conferences, etc but quals are one of the only institutional opportunities to enforce outside perspective. Part of the point of the PhD is learning how to approach problems that have no established solution, and someone who lacks breadth or depth will likely find it challenging to be a professional researcher.

agileAlligator 4y ago

What was the point of this article? To save everyone a click, the author failed the qualifying exam for the PhD program thrice and got kicked out. Article ends with her advisor petitioning for her to be reinstated to the program.

dangus 4y ago
Agreed, I'm sure it was a difficult experience and I can empathize with that, but there's just no real takeaway.

frankc 4y ago

I am really curious what the person writing this article thinks people will take away from it is. You failed three oral exams but were let through anyway because meritocracy has gone of out of fashion. Ok. I guess the article is just a slice of life piece for this magazine but its almost like it was generated by a right-wing ragebait factory to drum up racial tensions and anti-academic sentiment.

DevKoala 4y ago

The bar wasn’t lowered, it was removed altogether.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

selfhifive 4y ago

First the unrelated concepts argument. It's generally hard to know if a concept is related to your research without understanding it or knowing about it. Then there's the dunning kruger effect where we overestimate our own abilities. It's likely that there was a tangential link and the author failed to see it. Ironically her failure to see the relation possibly led to a poor impression. The argument of not having family members to talk about research is absurd because you always have some colleagues talking shop. The language argument fails because every year many immigrant students with English as a second language take the same exams and do well.

light_hue_1 4y ago

I got my PhD from a department with a strict qualifying exam (less than 50% pass rate). It was a tragic system that served no purpose. There were dozens of students who were clearly able to do research. Who had publications in top tier conferences and journals. But they had difficulties passing the qualifying exam (exams were based on courses which changed all the time, it was easy to be extremely good at say computer architecture but get a few oddball questions out in left field about some minutia you've never seen before). The real consequence of the system was that it discriminated against people who didn't understand it. You had to know to pick the right classes, to time it for the right year (where enough senior faculty had students who needed to pass it ASAP so that it would be easier). And of course, senior faculty with connections pulled strings to get their students past the exam. At my university now we thankfully don't do this insanity. Qualifying for the PhD is what it is supposed to be: can you publish? Ok, then show us a publication and defend it. Now let's talk about what you'll be doing for the rest of your PhD.

dumpsterdiver 4y ago

I found myself thinking it was strange that a domain named science.org would have so many ads, as if it were some sacred place where only learning is allowed to happen. I realized that wasn't a realistic expectation. I feel like this is an appropriate time to humbly present my easily auditable Chrome plugin that only toggles javascript (globally / every tab), and nothing more. It literally has one job, and that may not work for everyone. If you're in the habit of leaving unsaved work in background tabs then this extension probably isn't for you. It really will disable javascript on every tab. For browsing random javascript heavy sites though, I find it to be very useful. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/js-toggle/bnhjfamolmolljikdopibpabimjfellc https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/js-toggle/bnhjfamo...

runeblaze 4y ago

The comments here are too harsh. The emotional journey of failing high stakes exams and the helplessness of the closest people around you not knowing what it feels like is such an emotional roller-coaster. I mean, I failed too many technical interviews last year, and I am still heavily drained by that. Let's have more empathy to the author. 99% of us could all have bad streaks of exams/interviewing/fundraising rounds at some point in our life. Let's not let these setbacks define us.

loveparade 4y ago

I don't understand how "Black Lives Matter" and "BlackInTheIvory" is related to the content of this all. Why is this in there? This reads like it was generated by ChatGPT with "Write a sad story about PhD qualifying exams but sprinkle in references to social movements about racial inequality"

jdkee 4y ago

To add insult to injury, the job market for humanities PhDs has cratered. See https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/higher-ed-gamma/what-should-we-do-about-undergrads-who-want-pursue-humanities-doctorate https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/higher-ed-gamma/what-sh...

rmk 4y ago

Remarkably content-free article written by a thrice-rejected newly accepted PhD candidate at Northeastern University. What does this article seek to do? Does it Persuade? About what? Inform? That the author is a 'first-generation Afro-Latinx'? Check. That the bar was the same as every other one of the hundreds of grad schools in the nation, and then it was removed, so she can now proceed to research and the final defense? Check. It is of course not true in general, but I feel that it is now de rigueur for authors to inject race and hyphenated identities into practically everything they write, sadly reducing them to caricatures. It is difficult to take such writing seriously.