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Apr 29, 2008

Taking the RQE

Part of the PhD qualification process here in EECS is a presentation on a substantial body of research, called the Research Qualifying Exam or RQE. The presentation is given to two faculty members and is meant to mimic a conference talk.

When you first arrive in grad school, everyone tells you not to worry about the RQE. There are more important things to focus on in your first few years and, besides that, everyone passes. So I took everyone’s advice and didn’t think much about it for a few years.

At the department’s urging, I got my act together in February and submitted an abstract. I scheduled the exam for the end of April, feeling pretty calm about the whole thing.

Over the next few weeks, I put together the presentation. And I started to get worried. What sorts of things was my committee going to ask me? Is this research good enough for anything? Surely, you should already have some sort of award or commendation or Nobel Prize before you go into this, right?

I gave a practice talk to the rest of my group a few weeks ago. I got some good feedback and re-worked the presentation. But I was still freaking out. By this point, I was thinking that if they’ve failed anyone in the last 10 years, they’re going to fail me. I was petrified that, even though my slides were good (because I had been working on them for so long), I was going to get to the exam and have nothing to say other than, “Look! Diodes! Shiny diodes!”

This past weekend, I had friends of mine sitting in my apartment in shifts to listen to my talk. They were very helpful and very kind, but by the end of the weekend, I was convinced that I was going to fail. Even if the talk went fine, my committee was going to ask me to derive the full band structure of germanium… from first principles… while hopping on one foot. It was doomed to be a debacle.

I had my talk on Monday. The presentation went fine, the questions were nothing like what I was fearing, and my committee seemed to really like my research. It was such a relief! I’ve spent the last day and a half dancing around my office and sending emails with lots of exclamation points and smiley faces in them. I’m one step closer to graduation.

The author has filed this entry under the "Uncategorized" category.

5 Responses To This Entry:

    congrats! glad to hear it went well.

    Posted by: neha on April 30th, 2008 at 12:17 am

    Congrats! I am glad that things turned out better than you had expected.

    But the big question… Did you still have to hop on one foot?

    Posted by: ninja on April 30th, 2008 at 9:20 am

    Thanks guys!

    And no, Ninja, the entire presentation was a two-footed affair. :-)

    Posted by: ndilello on May 4th, 2008 at 3:47 pm

    Wait, so you’re saying you can’t derive the band structure of Germanium 8-) ?

    Who was on the committee?

    Posted by: Ivan on May 9th, 2008 at 10:47 am

    (I am now imagining you giving your presentation hopping on 2 feet)

    Posted by: ninja on May 16th, 2008 at 10:05 am

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