As my oral exam approaches, I am feeling the "not-smart-enough" creep up on me--a fear that I am a fraud who has somehow faked my way to this point and I am about to be exposed. Most people see the oral exam as not a big deal--the written is harder and the oral is a breeze, especially since I got such a good response to my written exam. But there is something hanging over me that prevents me from feeling that confidence. I have a difficult issue of representation and metaphor that I know I did not adequately address in my written exam (or in my diss proposal, for that matter) and that I am certain will come up in the oral. And I just don't know what to say. In fact, the problem I am having right now is that I can't formulate the proper question. There is a question on my written exam that I did not answer (and committees are notorious for making students answer questions in the oral that they avoided in the written) but that doesn't really ask a question, either. It is phrased as, "Write an essay that addresses..." That's not a question. If I can just wrap my mind around the right question, I think I can get down to the issue. And that's what my dissertation needs, too. That same question that is eluding me.
So today I feel not-smart-enough.
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3 comments:
I don't know how your oral exam process goes, but ideally it should be a conversation, I think. My sense has always been that the oral exam is primarily to evaluate whether you can direct a high-level academic conversation with colleagues, and not much more than that.
In other words, it sounds to me like you've already got the beginnings of a response to that question in the orals. You discuss the difficulty of formulating the question that you're trying to put together and the issues that make such formulation so difficult and lay out the methods you're thinking through to formulate the proper questions that will bring your analysis to where it needs to be.
Doesn't sound to me at all like an issue of fraudulence--simply an issue of recognizing how to frame the issues for yourself.
I hope that comment isn't anxiety-inducing on the day of the exam! Good luck!
(I'm an MA grad student, so take this for what it's worth... if anything at all...):
From what I've read and from what friends in PhD programs have told me, the oral exam is exactly what Scrivener described. If you can't, for the life of you, grasp that elusive question that seems to be hiding somewhere deep in your brain, during your orals, go ahead and be honest: You've been digesting their question posited to you since the written exam, and although you haven't quite found what you're looking for, you have knowledge of methods which you can use in order to help find what you're looking for. Show them that you can navigate the landscape of the mind, and that you're willing to admit, and work through, a challenge.
Anyway- good luck!
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