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

Physics (and other graduate things)

This week, I'm doing orientation for the physics graduate program at the University of Michigan. A few things of interest:

1) Safety training is both boring and funny at the same time.  A lot of the information is things that you HAVE to know, but so, so boring.  At the same time, the pictures of things that happen when things go wrong are for some reason funny (like the tank full of some compressed gas that somehow broke free of it's holder and made a hole in the roof of the building).

2) I don't remember much simple physics anymore.  One of the things I'm doing this week is taking GSI (Graduate Student Instructor) training, even though I'm not going to be a GSI (yay fellowships), and one of the things we had to do is "grade" an assignment.  Yeah..., I don't remember simple angular momentum.  Also, I can't grade homework.  I'm too nice...

3) Physics Graduate Students are all wacky and crazy.  I'm glad I'm not alone...

4) Having an office is cool, but at the same time, makes me feel old.  However, I'll be in there for long periods of time, especially while doing homework.

5) Even though the summer program I was part of is over, I'm still seeing the friends I made over the summer through it.  Makes me happy that we still find ways to get together.

6) Gyroscopes are AWESOME!!  Yeah, I got to play with one.

7) Being a graduate student is going to be fun.  Hard, but fun.

This week has got me looking forward to doing everything I'm going to do.  I'm excited for my classes, even if they are though, and I'm really excited to do research.  There'll be times when I wish I was doing something else (like a job and getting paid), but I think that the next 5-6 (hopefully) years will be some of the most memorable I'll have in my life.  Graduate School, here I come!