Comp prep question

[wacyeah]

Hi! I was hoping someone, more specifically from history department crowds to get back to my concerns for comps. I am currently a third year in History Ph.D. I will be tested on Modern Japan (but mainly on post-WWII era and post-3.11 Disaster period), US Popular culture (US TV/domesticity and Generation X), US foreign policy (nuclear age diplo and imperialism), and Material Culture/Visual Culture. For 4 different fields comp, there are two sub fields. I roughly read about 15-20 books for each question, so that means roughly around 120-160 books total (overlaps are allowed), and I know that it is relatively a low number of readings as compared to other historians' story on their time of the comps. Right now, I am trying to figure out the effective way to gut the books and not be killed with pressure tbh. Then also, how was your comp written and oral exams were like? 

[AP]

I am self-citing myself from another post here:

• Begin with three literature reviews and write a summary of the book in your own words. 
• Identify big themes (race, ethnicity, immigration, etc) and how your can use the book for what question.
• Jot down the table of contents
• Skim through notes and index to have an idea of what sources/archives the author uses, who they are engaging with, and what is the main focus in that big theme (e.g.: immigration in the Caribbean because you spotted Cuba, Jamaica, and Haiti).
• Read intro and take notes of main argument and chapters synopsis. 
• Read one chapter (at this point you should have enough information to choose)
• Read conclusion.

[wacyeah]

That sounds a really good strategy. Thank you!!

[TMP]

Whatever you do, keep those notes in a safe place (like the cloud).... you most definitely will refer to those notes later as you start on your dissertation, go about teaching your own course(s), and attend a range of academic talks.  it's not silly, it's smart.  I can guarantee you that you will find more than a few faculty members who have their gigantic binders from their comps somewhere in their offices.

[AP]

2 hours ago, TMP said:

Whatever you do, keep those notes in a safe place (like the cloud).... you most definitely will refer to those notes later as you start on your dissertation, go about teaching your own course(s), and attend a range of academic talks.  it's not silly, it's smart.  I can guarantee you that you will find more than a few faculty members who have their gigantic binders from their comps somewhere in their offices.

This is super important for all areas of of work. 

I have an external drive and the cloud and some items in the school's cloud. For notes, I use OneNotes, which saves to your laptop and syncs to the cloud. 

[Sigaba]

Here are a few tactics that I didn't realize were fair game until very late in the process of preparing for my quals.

• Arrange check in meetings with members of your committee (in some programs, graduate students are allowed to flounder).
  • Go into these meetings
    • with the intent of listening much more than you talk.
    • knowing how to talk about historiography, and 
    • knowing how to ask "is this going to be on the test" without actually asking "Is this going to be on the test?"
  • Some professors will look at you like you're a wounded seal and they're white sharks.
  • Others will offer remarks that can be easily missed because of the stress surrounding the exams
    • These remarks can range from head scratchingly subtle to telling you the questions.
    • Again, because of your stress level, this type of support may hit a wall, so listen carefully and reflect upon what you heard in the following days.
• Reach out to ABDs who rarely come to campus. The insights they share can be helpful especially since they've had time to recover from the ordeal of the exams.
• If you've taken classes or worked as a teaching assistant for a professor on your committee, review every exam question you've encounters. Look for themes and patterns.
• If a professor has put on file her midterm questions for undergraduate classes in a school library, spend time reading through those exams.

Other tactics that may help.

• If you have the opportunity to attend job talks, go.
  • Pay close attention to how faculty members in attendance turn up the heat on the candidate. The better the candidate does, the more fuel will be poured on the flames.
    • If you find yourself taking more and more heat during your oral exam, it may very well be that you're doing GREAT and your examiners are raising the bar just to see how high you can jump.
• Start conditioning your mind and body for the experience of writing the exams as soon as possible.
  • If you're an insomniac and night and day have switched places, start looking for ways to realign your body clock.
  • Simulate taking an exam by sitting down and writing coherently for several hours.
  • Figure out, practice, and tweak your pre exam ablutions and meals.
  • Get your GI tract synchronized with the stress levels so you won't have any avoidable distractions/disturbances on the nights before and days of.
  • Figure out what you're going to wear each day of the week of and get your outfit "just so". 
    • The last thing you need to deal with is laundry day.
• If you have the option to do so, consider the advantages of scheduling your exams so you can get through them as fast as possible.
  • I had a classmate who wrote his four exams on consecutive days.
  • I somewhat followed his lead and took them over a couple of weeks.
  • For me, the advantage was that my windows for freaking the F out were much smaller.
• Make peace with the likelihood that you'll never be ready for your qualifying exams, and that you'll likely feel much less ready than you actually are.
  • Please note that acceptance isn't the same as resignation. You will probably feel better about things if you prepare as hard as you can so that when you're waiting for the results after the oral phase that you've done the best that you can.
• Understand that in addition to being a form of professional development, quals are also a ritual.
  • For some (many) academic historians, a part of the ritual is giving graduate students hard stares, smirks, and remarks about how much standards have slipped and how much harder things were back in the time when graduate students read by candlelight and had nothing for nourishment but their own tears.
    • When you're taking your exams, expect no quarter.
• Qualifying exams are hard and stressful and ferocious.As a kid, I witnessed my mom try to run my dad over with a car.  In college, I had a loaded gun pointed at my head. . Individually, those and other experiences were less stressful than qualifying exams. (Collectively, it's a close call.)
• Understand that the ordeal may get the better of you and that you may have one or more freak outs.
  • Do what you can so that the freak outs aren't CLMs and/or occur while you're taking your quals.
• Understand that after you finish your exams that you are going to need time to heal.
  • Do what you can to not schedule anything especially important or stressful in the weeks (if not months) after your exams.
• Keep your sense of humor at all times.
  • The ability to laugh at your self throughout the process and after will help to counter the feelings of despair, failure, and contempt that may come.

One last recommendation that dovetail's with @AP's guidance.

Every work of history by a professional academic historian is going to fit into at least three historiographical contexts. The importance of those contexts is going to be in the eye of the committee member reading your exams. Some will be satisfied with the big themes. Others will want to make sure you understand the intermediate themes. And a few will want to make sure you know the details chapter and verse. It is incumbent upon a graduate student to figure out the expectations of the readers and then strive to meet and/or manage those expectations.

 

[AfricanusCrowther]

Ask more advanced students if they pre-wrote for their exam and, if so, whether it was effective for them. By pre-writing, I mean composing answers to potential questions in complete prose. Don't listen to people who advise against it by appealing to common sense; only heed their advice if they tried it and it failed (or if your department discourages it). Pre-writing was well worth the effort for me -- I passed with distinction and now have 60 pages of writing on various topics to draw on for lectures or other writing.

Edited October 4, 2019 by AfricanusCrowther

[AP]

On 10/4/2019 at 3:00 AM, Sigaba said:

 

Every work of history by a professional academic historian is going to fit into at least three historiographical contexts. The importance of those contexts is going to be in the eye of the committee member reading your exams. Some will be satisfied with the big themes. Others will want to make sure you understand the intermediate themes. And a few will want to make sure you know the details chapter and verse. It is incumbent upon a graduate student to figure out the expectations of the readers and then strive to meet and/or manage those expectations.

 

Just to be clear, ASK what those expectations are. Comps are (in theory) a learning opportunity so you are more than entitled to ask what the expectations are. This will help you discern how each faculty will evaluate your work. 

[Sigaba]

2 hours ago, AP said:

Just to be clear, ASK what those expectations are. Comps are (in theory) a learning opportunity so you are more than entitled to ask what the expectations are. This will help you discern how each faculty will evaluate your work. 

I did not understand that I could have done a lot more asking than I did.?

So please learn from my misunderstanding. Go to your committee members and ask as many well phrased questions as you need. (The secondary emphasis here is on well phrased.) Go and ask especially if you're the "I'm supposed to figure this stuff out on my own" type.

If a member of your committee, especially the chair, is disinterested, or, worse, uninterested (I am not bitter, not even a little), in your preparation and won't lean in, have a sit down conversation with yourself to develop your options. The options range from rearranging your committee, to firing your committee chair, to figuring out ways to mitigate your chair's indifference. (If your fields are anywhere near American diplomatic, naval, and military history, drop me a PM.)

[TMP]

At this point, entering into my 8th (and final!) year, my comps feel like another lifetime.  I do agree with both @Sigaba and @AP.  

• DO go to the job talks in your department even if no other graduate student does. Even if it's not in your field.  Do it. You're going because you need to see how job candidates draw out big themes in his or her work to connect to the audience and how the audience-- faculty members in DIFFERENT fields-- find ways to connect. I recall one job talk by a 18th century French cultural historian and a 20th century Chinese cultural historian raised his interest and question to her project. "I'm a Chinese historian BUT I LOVE your work on cultural networks of presses in France!  Here's my question...."  Not only this but you will be SO far ahead of the game from your peers.
• Do ask what the committee member's expectation is.  Every person is going to be different. Either I was awful at phrasing my questions of "what are we really going to talk about?" as @Sigaba warned of, or my committee was reluctant to be specific, either way, I actually failed my oral exam for that reason (among a few other critical areas).  Once I picked up the pieces (with the help of my saint adviser), we were able to outline clear expectations in writing. Only with this list was I able to determine when I was truly ready to re-take my oral exam.
• Truthfully, try to have at least one committee member who is very down-to-earth (but intense), patient, and "harmless" (like a whale shark among the white sharks).  The person will make a huge, huge difference to your sanity.  I had a senior, top-of-the-field professor who had nothing to lose in her ranking by throwing soft balls in my way while everyone else (including my adviser) wanted to engage deeper, provoking, out-of-the-left field questions. I could not wait for her turn during the orals.

It's okay to be traumatized, even if you have (mostly) nice group of professors who mean well. Until that point, you will never have experienced that kind of stress.  (Ask me again the spring when I finish my dissertation and whether that was more stressful...)