Week 78 - Passed!

That's right, folks. At 5.30 pm, a committee member emerged from the room and shook my hand - beating my advisor who is the traditional bearer of news. A minute later, it was his smiling face that I had been awaiting. He told me I had done a nice job. A short time later, I was truly humbled by the joy of my committee at how my examination went. My committee was happy with my work, some even impressed. And just like that, I was passed. I have a few notes from my exam but it was mostly based on questions I didn't quite get right. In the end, what I didn't get right doesn't really matter to you all but suffice it to say that I have been examined on nearly everything, including: termite guts, astronomy, experimental power, amino acid absorption, milk protein synthesis, adipose tissue, rumen thermodynamics, the Wolfe Cycle, hydrogenases, open-circuit chambers, Type I vs. II error, experimental design, and modeling theory. Passing is a great feeling, but I hope that someday people will read this who are approaching their own exams as a necessary stage towards a doctorate. And so I want to give the best advice that can be given about exams; it was given to me about a year ago and I will add in a few sidethoughts as well.

Hannah and mommy are so happy to have their dad back. :)

1) You are picking mentors, not examiners. First, your exam is not about your committee proving they are smarter than you. Instead, my advisor said that by the end, you should be more knowledgeable on the specific research you are doing than any one person on your committee. Your committee is responsible for making sure that you know the foundational information in the areas they are experts so that they can support you through your research to become a unique expert yourself. If a committee member does not contribute expertise to your doctoral research, you have wasted a spot. Be judicious in your selection and make sure each person fills a role that is neither duplicated nor unnecessary. By doing so, your exam will be more meaningful and less like a necessary evil.

2) You can pass your exam if you challenge yourself. Your advisor should never let you pass the writtens or even take them if he/she does not feel comfortable that you are ready to prove yourself in front of your committee. However, it is the sole responsibility of the student to be prepared. Only you know yourself, your weaknesses and your strengths. If you do not take the time to determine your weak points and ask the necessary questions to bolster your knowledge, you fail yourself. Even if you pass you will not have maximized this learning opportunity and challenged yourself to reach a new level of competence.

3) You will get questions wrong. Any committee would be concerned if you did not answer questions wrong. This is due to the nature of science and your prematurity in the field. Foremost, you are a novice in a room full of tenure-track professors. You should not be expected to get everything perfect, just as they would not expect themselves to recite everything. Also, as science is always changing, the "right" answer is not a constant. Rote memorization develops poor scientists who are unwilling to think the box. This doesn't mean that you should challenge fact, but you should also not subscribe to the most recent theory just because it was published in "Science" or "Nature". Be critical. And be willing to admit when you do not know or when you are wrong.

4) Think critically. In the end, your exam is not about your ability to recite correct answers but about your ability to think critically. You must be able to look at a research paper and determine what was done wrong. And you must be able to say how it would have been better. You should be able to think of a creative way to test a hypothesis using known methodologies in your field. And you must be able to identify possible causal sources for an unusual experimental observation. These are not right vs. wrong answers, they test the bounds of your analytical and critical thinking. To be a PhD you must be able to do this above and beyond anything else. Science will change over your life, but the process will remain the same and it must be followed for the sake of future research.

5) Know your proposal. Your proposal is the first step towards you becoming an expert. There will be things in that proposal that should not be known by all the members of your committee. And so you should be expected to know your proposal and the literature that led you to that proposal. Your committee should never ask you a question about the research you proposed to do (hypothesis, methods, theory, previous similar efforts, expected value range for data) that you cannot answer. You must be the end-all on your proposal. My advisor asked if I printed mine to take into my exam and I told him that if I couldn't remember what was on my own proposal and why I wrote it, I didn't deserve to pass. If you get uncomfortable easily, you might want a copy of it to help you feel more confident, but you shouldn't need to read it to answer their questions.

7) Don't study. I saved the most controversial for last, and my wife would tell you that I studied all the time. But I called it studying because that was easier to explain. Don't study - learn. There is a distinct difference that relates back to thinking critically. Sure, there are some facts to memorize and maybe some industry benchmarks to know so that you don't look like an idiot about the real world. But studying leads to memorization in most peoples' books. What you need is to learn. Learn processes and how they can change. Learn the history of research in your field and how ideas have changed. Know the literature and how it guided you to your proposal.

So there, that's all the help I got, except one final comment about being a good graduate student in general. The previous PhD candidate in our lab told me that I should always read 1 manuscript a day. This keeps you up to date on research and allows you to look back into past work. I keep a running list of potential reads on my desktop and work through them daily, adding to the list when I find something new. If you read an article every day through graduate school you can't help but know the literature well.

Now that I am done I get to spend more time with this pretty baby.

Now that I passed, I got to sleep in. And so did Betsy.

A graduate student asked me if I felt better after the exam, as if a monkey got lifted off my back. I laughed and said that I was certainly relieved but never uncomfortable in the exam room. But the hour or two before the exam I ran out of things to do in the lab and started to get very anxious, even calling my wife just to talk and calm down. I said that then it felt like the monkey on my back had been given Xanax (a little poke at recent history) but after my exam the monkey was thrown in front of a bus. No, the monkey wasn't lifted off my back - it was thrown. The level of relief at passing will be rivaled only by the joy of my dissertation defense. If only that wasn't so far away...

Speaking of passage, this week also marks the approval of a new farm bill (about time!) that is encouraging if not positive. The good news, the SNAP program (food stamps for you old-timers) received a cut in millions of dollars. The bad news is that this was preached as a sacrifice woeful to the poor, but in reality it only cut down on abuses of the system and amounted to something like 1% of the total expenditure. Meanwhile, agricultural subsidies continue to come under fire and people neglect the cold hard fact that we must subsidize our agriculture. If we don't, it will move to China like everything else. No matter how you feel about jobs moving to other countries and capitalism, you have to see that when you food is produced outside your country, it is a security threat. People are blind because of the rhetoric surrounding agriculture but they need to open their eyes. Either you start paying more for food so that subsidies aren't necessary to protect the industry, or you will pay more in taxes (or imaginary government money) to secure that food at low cost and prevent outside competition. That is the way of it. Besides, with our ability to produce food in this country being more efficient than anywhere else on the planet, it is a service to the world to protect that food production (in case you were looking for moral hills). I wasn't as negative or positive about the farm bill as some, but if you want to read more, you should. Try clicking here or here.

The farm bill is a lot like mom's birthday cake. The biggest three pieces are the SNAP program.

Beautiful ice this week as we approach Valentine's Day weekend. Since my wife and I didn't celebrate until Sunday, I saved our little romantic story for the next post. But keep reading, we're only 4 weeks away from being caught up again. A few pictures to close out the week.

The sunrise through Jack Frost's best work on our barn windows.

A cold sunrise lights up the few walking paths to the gate and barn. Record snowfall in decades this year.

This crossed my Facebook page this week and I couldn't agree more.