preliminary report on prelims

I got the phone call from the Advisor and the report was great! He said that my exam was "quite good" and had some specific compliments for me. I will share two because they may be useful for others.

The big strategy that paid off was that I focused the questions into something workable. All of my questions were very large, broad, big picture questions, and I was required to use so many primary texts and so many secondary texts from such and so lists to answer them. And I only had an hour for each essay. So I took the big fat big picture question, took a few introductory sentences to narrow it down (and justify the narrowing) and then wrote essays about the narrower topics. I was nervous initially because I was afraid that I might appear to be side stepping the question, but this strategy actually worked well because I explained why the narrower topic was important to the big picture (briefly) and then could actually say something substantial rather than broad generalizations.

The other strategy was actually suggested by a colleague who was going in to defend his dissertation at the same time. He advised me to mention texts or theorists that were related to the topic but that weren't necessarily essential to the answer--works I wanted to talk about but didn't have time to elaborate on. A little name dropping. Then that would demonstrate my breadth of knowledge while at the same time providing topics to discuss in the oral exam. The Advisor noticed that I did that and commented that it was great because, in fact, it provided plenty of material for my committee for the oral exam. Material that I provided, so I am already comfortable talking about it. (The key here is to drop names you WANT to talk about!)

As far as the experience of the exam--utterly dissatisfying. But a lot of people have expressed the same feelings about their exams. I was frustrated because I did not have enough time to write about some really important issues and texts. I spent too much time on the first question and had to short-change the last one (which is a guarantee that I'll be talking about it at the oral). I was shocked by the limitations of the test situation--as far as the opportunity to develop good essays in such a short time--even though I knew what I was getting into. But apparently, it all worked out well.

And a week from today I have the oral exam. I need a new ticker.