By 9 am Friday, November 2nd, my advisor will email me my three comprehensive exam questions. I have exactly a week to answer them. He says I'm prepared, and I appreciate his confidence in me. I think I'm reasonably prepared, too, and I greatly appreciate that among my numerous anxieties, test-taking isn't one of them. Far from it, in fact. See, I'm one of those mystical kids that policymakers have in mind when they come up with laws like No Child Left Behind. I'm the one who actually likes taking tests and fools himself into thinking they're just a harmless yet useful snapshot of broad academic knowledge and skill. Give me a #2 pencil and bubbles to fill in and I'll happily work for hours.
There won't be any bubbles on my comprehensive exam, but there will be hours of work. Over the past week I've been making my final preparations, most of which are designed to make next week go as smoothly as possible. A summary:
Ready My References
I think my personal library will have most of the math and learning science books I might want, but I felt like some extra perspectives and guides concerning experimental design, casual inference, and statistics might come in handy. I know I can't expect to read any of these cover-to-cover in the course of the next week, but if nothing else the examples and explanations they contain could be valuable.
Having books around is a luxury, but for this level of work, it's even more important to have a way of keeping track of the hundreds of journal articles that I might want to use in my comps responses. I've been using
Mendeley as my reference manager since the spring of 2010. Regardless of what tool you use -- Zotero, RefWorks, Endnote, Papers, etc. -- it's important during any writing period to have something that allows you to focus on writing, not scrambling for citation information and digging through the APA style book.
One of the best investments I've made as a grad student has been my diligent attention to the annotation, curation, and metadata accuracy of my Mendeley library. I was somewhat lax about it during my master's year and my first year of the PhD program, but then I spent most of two weeks of a summer going back through every PDF, every book, every syllabus, and every paper I wrote to make sure I had everything neatly cataloged. And I haven't relaxed since. Right now I have 890 references in my personal library, with others in group collections, and I can find or cite any of them in just seconds.
If there's one thing I
can't let myself do is turn my comps into a massive search for new literature. I admit, I love the thrill of the hunt, and I've spent many hours digging around in Google Scholar tracking down papers that I realistically have no time to read. I need to trust that most of what I need I already have and I've already read, and keep my literature hunting to a minimum.
Minimize Distractions and Get Comfortable
For my last week before comps, I actually spent very little time studying and more time minimizing potential distractions. I've been to the grocery store, I've washed dishes and laundry, and I reformatted and reinstalled
my operating system,
virtual machine, and software on my computer because a few things had gotten flaky after a year of hard use. I've never liked studying right before a test anyway, as any attempt to "cram" is nullified by thoughts that always begin, "If I don't know it by now...." I passed my 100-hour studying mark a week or so ago and that will have to be good enough.
I'll probably work mostly at my desktop. If your computer had three monitors, 16 GB of RAM, university broadband peaking at nearly 90Mbps up and down, and a pair of
Sennheiser HD 595s, you'd probably work at it, too. I might try working some in my office, and my kitchen table is nice for when a lot of open books are involved. I don't want to be stuck in my office chair for 18 hours a day, so I plan to do some heavy thinking while running and in a pinch I can even prop my laptop up on my exercise bike.
Sometimes I work in silence, but not very often. I don't want to get distracted by moving pictures, but there are a
few movies I can play for background noise without losing focus, mostly because I've seen them so many times. I can get distracted by
podcasts, so I'll try to listen to those selectively over the next week. I'll
listen to a lot of music, and my tastes for a task like this tend to be towards the incredibly gifted (Tori Amos, Curtis Mayfield, Norah Jones, Sia) and music that's downtempo/trip-hop or otherwise having a likable female vocal/bass combo (Thievery Corporation, Zero 7, Garbage). Seriously, in the midst of an important exam, who
wouldn't want to perform as relaxed and confidently as LouLou?:
OpenComps Get Less Open
Obviously, yet unfortunately, once I get my questions I'm pretty limited in what I can say about them. I'm not to receive outside help, solicited or unsolicited, and even after the exam is over I'm only to talk about the process in general terms. (I'm assuming that's in the event my committee members want to reuse the same or similar questions in the future.) Assuming I'm not exhausted by the process, I'll try to summarize my approach and workflow, lessons learned, and hopefully some epiphanies that come in the process of working through my questions. I'm looking forward to the week of writing and then readying myself for the oral defense, scheduled for November 27th.
