Preparing for Qualifying Exams - meyermicrobiolab/Meyer_Lab_Resources GitHub Wiki

General guide for PhD qualifying exams:

• You will send a polished, chair-approved version of your proposal to all committee members at least one month before your written qualifying exam so that committee members can have time to read it and develop questions from your proposal.
• Ideally, contact your committee the semester before you want to do quals to give them a heads up, at which point you can and should ask your committee members if they have specific recommendations for what you should study for your qualifying exams.
• We will set a week for the written exam questions – most likely one day per committee member. You will send the answers to both the committee member and to your committee chair. As your chair, I will collect all of the answers and distribute them to all of the committee members in one email (please don’t bombard your committee members with reply all emails).
• In general, each committee member will set the expectations for the written questions - (typically, most people do an open-book exam). They may provide an approximate length of answer that is expected.
• The oral exam will be about two weeks after the written exam so that all committee members can review your answers and prepare questions for the oral exam. This session will likely be about 3 hours.
• During the oral exam, you will first give a polished, chair-approved presentation of your proposal and status of each chapter, presenting preliminary data, plans for publication, timeline of what is left to complete for your degree.

Your goals for the proposal presentation and your final defense:

• Overall, you are telling your committee: 1) Why are you doing this work? & 2) Why should they (or anyone else) care?
• Present the significance of your research within the field of study – how does your work fill a gap in knowledge? You must know your field to understand how your work fits into that field. This is why you are doing a literature review, why I am always sending you papers to read, why we do journal clubs, and why we attend conferences. This is also what your committee is looking for in the qualifying exams and defense – how well do you know your field?
• Why is your work important (not just that it hasn’t been done before)? What is the ONE thing? as Randy Olson would say.
• You should be fully aware of the limitations of your methods and your study design. The perfect study does not exist – be prepared to describe the limitations and describe how you are doing the best given the situation (and time/monetary limitations).
• At your final defense, your goal is to demonstrate that you have gained wisdom, not just knowledge through the course of your research. The difference lies in context. As a graduate student you have been learning the minutiae of a topic, but you also need to be able to back up and see the bigger picture. This is synthesis: can you take a large amount of information (knowledge) and pick out the larger patterns or distill the information down to its most essential points (determine what is important and what isn’t)? How does this information advance your field? How does it relate to other fields? How can you apply this knowledge to a new problem?
• Many dissertations read like lists of results. A demonstration of synthesis is to be able to embed the results in a narrative. This is why I gave you all copies of The Narrative Gym and why I am always citing Writing Science. The former tells you how to structure your narrative (within sentences, paragraphs, and the whole document) and the later tells you how to sharpen your message at the word, sentence, and paragraph levels. Using narrative and writing effectively are life skills that takes a lifetime of practice, but it will serve you well in any future career.

Example questions (pulled from a variety of sources):

• Put together an ideal panel or symposium of experts from your field and justify your choices.
• You are given a paper to read beforehand, then in the oral exam you explain the paper to: a) peers in academia, b) class of elementary students, c) congressional aides, d) blue-collar adults.
• What direction is your field going? What are the major breakthroughs in the past 10 years? What do you think are the most pressing questions moving forward?
• Write a press release for your first chapter/paper.
• Write an ABT statement about your research project, with an IF/THEN clause.
• If time/money were no object, how would you re-design/improve your study?
• An example defense question (rather than for quals): what would be the follow-up to your finished research? What experiments would you do next?
• Here is a general question format: You are given a paper to read beforehand, then in the written exam you explain the major implications of the paper and how it impacts the interpretation of your own research.
• Here is a specific example I have asked before of the previous general example: "1. In your first research chapter, you propose to test the relative impact of abiotic and biotic factors on soil microbial community structure. Given the long residence time of free DNA in soil, how will you account for the confounding effects of relic DNA in your analysis? Which analyses are most likely impacted (alpha diversity, beta diversity, network analysis, etc.) by relic DNA? Which fractions of the community will most likely contain relic DNA (nematodes, fungi, bacteria, etc.)? Please provide support for your answers from the primary literature." The student's answer was roughly two pages long, single-spaced.
• Using no more than one standard page of text (1” margins, single-spaced, 12-pt font), explain your dissertation research and why it matters on a 5th grade level.
• Select one preliminary finding from your dissertation research and craft a 1-2 page mock grant proposal that explains the finding, its relevance for microbial ecology, and a brief overview of a follow-up study (including hypothesis and methods) you would conduct with the “grant” money. Budgetary information is not necessary.
• You may also be asked to design an experiment to demonstrate "X" (this would be very specific to your research area).