Quals

One thing most Graduate Students have to do at some point in their Graduate Career is to take what's known as the qualifying exam, or the quals.  Many Students shudder when they hear this word; it brings either bad memories or extreme nervousness.
True to most universities, University of Michigan also has a qualifier prerequisite for becoming a Ph.D. candidate.  As such, many of us graduate students scramble to try to remember things we learned in our undergraduate career, things that we sometimes haven't seen in 3-4 years.
This past weekend I took the first of two quals, the Classical Quals, at the University of Michigan.  From what I coulld tell, it was a pretty fair test, making sure we had basica understanding of concepts that we should have learned while in undergrad.  However, having not been exposed to many of the concepts presented for a while, I found myself stuggling with problems that I know that if I had tried answering back when I first learned about it, I  would have found extremely easy.  However, because of the time difference, I could not remember simple equations or relations between things.
Which brings me to my point: what is the point of these exams?  Much of the test seems to revolve around knowledge of random equations, which, throughout all my my undergrad and graduate career, was never the focus of physics.  Instead, at least as far as I know, physics is the interplay of concepts to try to come up with relationships between forces and interactions in the natural.  By testing our knowledge of a small subset of physics equations, are they really probing how well we know physics?
Now, I'm probably exagerating a bit, because most of the problems involved a physical system and a questions about what happens.  But, because many of my difficulties involved not remembering the equations, even though I knew what was going on, I could not solve the problem.
Several Universities are realizing this shortcoming of the qualifying exam and are either downplaying its importance or removing it from the requirements completely.  Instead, they focus more on research done by the student, and how they've taken ideas from classes and applied them to their research (the idea behind the preliminary exam, whose premise I agree with).
Then again, maybe they expect us to remember pages and pages worth of somewhat random equations...

Eddie

Blogging in the New Year

I have a nasty habit of not updating my blog very often.  Usually, I get carried away with other things, mainly with schoolwork, that I forget to update or, more likely, say to myself, "I'll do that later."  As it is a new year, I'm once again resolving to write more often on my blog.
So, there goes another year, and another decade.  This has been a very busy year for me, with me graduating from Iowa State University and the start of Grad School at the University of Michigan.  It's been a year of changes, of goodbyes and of new friends.  But most importantly, it's been a year that's seen a maturing in myself.  I've grown this year in ways that I could not have imagined when it started.
As 2010 commences, I only hope that I can continue to better myself as a person, to continue to pursue my dreams as a graduate student in physics, and to continue to live life to its fullest.  After all, what's a new year if you don't live your life, exploring the new opportunities the year brings you?  2010 will be a good year, and one that I hope will be as memorable, if not more so, than the ones that have preceded it.