rax | (Reply)

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I think one of the hard things about quals is agonizing about how to distill everything you know into those four essays or those three hours, and eventually coming to terms with the fact that you cannot possibly do that and instead you have to prioritize. I think I did a good job of picking my reading list for oral quals (I didn't have to write essays; I was working under a system in which one takes a couple of separate written exams), but during the three-hour oral exam itself, I did a poor job of budgeting the time to the material. We spent too much time on stuff that wasn't really my focus and not enough time on stuff that should have been. I didn't know, going in, that I had the right to impose a fair amount of structure on those three hours, and I didn't do that.