Surviving the Qualifying Exam

Hadear Hassan

When I first got accepted into my PhD program, I remember going over the requirements detailed in my letter. One of them was that to remain in the program, you had to pass your qualifying, preliminary and defense exam. I remember having never heard of a qualifying exam before reading this letter. After doing a quick Google search, I knew enough about that exam to know that I would’ve preferred not to do it. Each program has different qualifying exam requirements, but my program usually requires you to take it in your third long semester. So, this exam has been in the back of my head for over a year before I had to actually take it. Fast-forward to the day they finally emailed me about my exam. Unexpectedly, it was a few months earlier than traditionally offered, and I couldn’t have been more grateful. I was ready to get it over with. I believe most engineering programs have the same type of exam, minus or plus a few requirements. For mechanical engineering, they assign you a research paper, then you have to write a critical review, literature review and a proposal related to that assigned paper. It is a long exam, but they give you ample of time to finish it up. I think what I was most stressed about was not being able to come up with an idea for the proposal, but that came so easily once I got the paper. After submitting your proposal/paper, you then have to present in front of a committee of 2 professors. The presentation is 15 minutes, and the questioning is 30 minutes (feels a lot longer than that when you are in the room).

Now that I have officially finished and passed that exam, there’s a few things I would do completely differently. For starters, if I could erase all the stress I associated with this exam, I would. I am not saying it is not a stressful experience, I’m just saying that if you take it easy everything will be fine. Some advice on how to prepare for it is to practice. 

The best way to practice for that exam is just to go through multiple rounds before your exam actually happens. Pick a paper every now and then and pretend that it is your qualifying exam assigned paper. Think about a proposal idea. You obviously don’t have to go through the whole proposal writing every time, but it will train you to just get ideas and generate innovative proposals. Practice your presentation skills in your lab meetings and practice answering questions. Take a writing and communication class. A lot of the grading is based on how well you write and present your proposal. There are a few engineering writing and communication classes offered, and I for one took PETE 660 over the summer and it was really helpful. 

The process of choosing papers after receiving your paper was more or less a first come first serve process.They send you a list of papers from where to choose your assigned paper. For that part, I really
stress the importance of time - take your time to figure out what paper you want by looking through each one. But do not waste too much time reading each and every detail, as you might lose your opportunity to get the one you want. I know this is cliché but trust your guts, and if one of the options is a review paper, be careful with choosing it, because that will be a lot of extra work. Prepare as much as you can, understand everything that is being said in that paper, even little words that you might assume aren’t important, since they might ask you for their definitions. With that, study concepts that are connected to that paper. There is no such thing as being  overprepared for your QE. Make your presentation interesting. You have to be able to tell a story: Why  am I doing this? What have people done before me? What am I contributing? What is the bigger picture? Those are some great questions to think about when making your presentation. 

There’s a lot you can do to prepare for your qualifying exam. As long as you work hard and give it your all, I truly believe the results will be in your favor. Some really good advice for after your presentation that my advisor gave me (because I felt that I had done terribly) is that you’re most probably never going to come out of that exam feeling great about yourself because the whole purpose of it is for them to push you to see how much you know.