Nerve Endings Firing Away

First, being a PhD candidate is vastly different from a Manchurian Candidate or at least we like to think so. Second, I am finally one. i.e a PhD candidate not the other one. I cleared one of the first hurdles that haunts most doctoral students, freeing me finally to work on my dissertation and put that pesky course work behind me. No longer do I have to attend any courses or worry about midterms or assignments (not that I wouldn’t or couldn’t). In PhD lingo, passing this first hurdle toward achieving that elusive target signifies that your department and more importantly, your committee considers you fit enough to conduct research that will culminate in your dissertation.

But as any seasoned doctoral student including the ones on PhD Comics knows, the entire process isn’t just about academic talent but also about developing relationships with your peers and professors. I was lucky to have an extremely helpful committee who posed no unreasonable obstacles in my path. My chair (in fact, a co-chair) took an active interest in helping me develop a basic schematic of my research proposal around which the committee would test me on. The exam in itself was a grueling process spread over three days. I was given 2 questions each day and four hours per question. I ended up cranking out around 30 single-spaced pages over those three days answering questions in planning theory, research methods and design, statistics, and my substantive research areas of brownfields remediation and gentrification. Of course, the answers had to be complete in terms of cited references too but that’s a given in any work produced by a PhD student even if it is a timed exam. I was never more tired of typing than I was at the end of those three days. I honestly couldn’t have done it again if I hadn’t made it. Only after you have gone through the process do you learn to appreciate the efforts of others before you.

I was never good at handling exam pressure so naturally I was a bundle of nerves for the past few weeks (ah-ha! hence the blogging break!) but in the end, it was an anti-climax and I needn’t have fretted at all. Old habits die hard. But this is hardly the end of the road; in fact it is just the first step of the next stage and this success goes a long way in boosting my confidence. However, for now I can sit back, relax for a while, and look forward to my wedding in nearly two months. Whew! Life goes by fast.