104 down, 0 to go.

I've finished reading all the texts on my exam list!

As you can see, Nora took an interest in the stacks yesterday... but there they all are.  I finished my reading today, as planned, just over a week ahead of my exam on November 27.  This means I can take a bit of a break for the rest of the day before I begin preparing for the exam itself.

I guess this is as good a time as any to explain a little bit more about what the exam is like for those of you who are curious.  One week ahead of the exam, my advisor will send me the "questions" I'm supposed to answer in the exam.  There will probably be four, and they will be worded sort of like elaborate essay questions you might see on a final exam (if the reading material for the class was my exam list).  I'll get those tomorrow, which means I'll have about a week to review my notes, synthesize my ideas, work on my answers to the questions, and figure out other things I want to try to make sure to bring up in the exam.

The exam itself is a two hour oral exam.  It begins with me giving a 20 minute presentation from memory, in which I talk about my project by answering one of the exam questions.  For the remaining 100 minutes, my committee of four professors will ask me questions and I'll have to answer them.  Generally, the idea is that I'm supposed to meet two goals.  First, I'm supposed to prove that my list is comprehensive for my field (in this case, 20th Century American Lit) and that I have a firm understanding of all the texts on my list.  Second, my composure during the exam is supposed to demonstrate that I'm capable of thinking on my feet, taking questions seriously, and speaking authoritatively about my own original ideas (like one would be expected to do in a job interview).  How the exam goes seems to depend a lot on what approach your committee members take.  I expect the questions my professors give me to be difficult but fair.

Some of my classmates have stressed out about forgetting what they read, or having trouble thinking of answers, or feeling like their professors might dismiss their ideas.  I have two main fears.  First, I worry that I will not understand my professors' questions well enough to answer them.  I still struggle a lot with what I consider academic jargon, and especially since it's a high-pressure environment, I worry that I'll just blank out and have to ask them to rephrase their questions so much that it might make me look dumb.  I'm also terrified that I will cry.  I cried in my master's defense, and I have gotten choked up a few times while discussing my ideas with my advisor.  I care about this stuff a lot, I'm very invested in the work I've done, and especially now that it deals with gender oppression and procreation, some of it strikes very close to home.  Plus, this work is intimately tied up with the losses I've experienced since I began graduate school.  A few weeks ago, an envelope fell out of one of my books, on which my dad had been keeping score of the last game of crazy 8s we ever played together.  For me, the personal is definitely political, and vice versa. I absolutely cannot cry this time... but how do you practice "not crying"?

After the two hours are up, they ask you to step out of the room so they can briefly discuss your command of the material and your composure during the exam.  Then they bring you back in and usually tell you you've passed.  It's unusual for anyone to fail; more commonly, your advisor asks you to delay your exam if s/he thinks you're not ready to pass it.  Nobody has suggested that I should postpone my exam, but my committee has had a pretty hands-off approach all the way along, so I'm not sure any of them have a particularly clear idea of what I plan to talk about.  And people do periodically fail, though given the nature of that disappointment, I've never asked one of those people why they think they failed.  So I don't know how exactly that would play out.

My advisor, in particular, loves these exams and has quite a romanticized view of them.  He sees the exam as the moment when a student shows that her research and her ideas prove she is ready to make the transition from being a student to being a colleague.  But part of the reason I've been successful up to this point is that he has always treated my ideas as if they are worthy of serious consideration, so part of me just feels like all I have to do in my exam is prove him right.  In one of our meetings this semester, he told me "You're a mom.  You can do anything."

I am considering getting this printed on a tanktop to wear under my clothes for the exam. : )