Real talk: Candidacy Exams (reply)

This afternoon I walked into a small room at Ohio State, talked about my passion to three people and another person on a screen, and then turned in a sheet of paper to a much bigger room. I just sat down to write this after coming home, and at this time the experience seems so small that it could be trivial. But that impression may be deceptive.

This is a partial response to my friend Kate's blog, "Real Talk." I'm writing this for her, for you, and for me. Even though the oral exam seems so small at this moment, its size may be hidden by its depth. So I'll take Kate's outline and plug in my own experience.

Opacity (and Foxes).

As Kate says, there's no certain methods for exam prep. I tried many. This may be a difference of personality. Alan Palmer says that academics are either hedgehoxes or foxes; they either persist, like hedgehogs, or they rely on trickiness, like foxes. I am a fox, and I tried to outfox the exam with methods including:

1. Detailed notes on every source, ranging from textual production and historical context to structure and critique.
2. Flash cards on fundamental facts, such as character names and year of production, for each source.
3. Frequent meetings with the committee members.
4. A reading group.
5. Synthetic drawings, comics, and diagrams.
6. Teaching the material, or sitting in on classes.
7. Mnemonics and memory palaces.
8. Frantic cramming in the hours before the exam.

Honestly, they all worked. Every one of these preparation methods facilitated a different kind of answer. Putting them together facilitated many kinds of answers. I didn't apply all of these to all texts. In fact, I think that I changed methods because my thoughts about big issues were changing.

I understand that this kind of change can be scary, especially when the test is so opaque. Kate wrote,

"The fact that I had no way of checking whether I was preparing sufficiently and correctly–that I didn’t know what others meant by ‘reading’ a work and they didn’t know exactly what I meant by it–was the hardest part of the whole exam process."

If you're like Kate, meaning if you're anxious about your mode of preparation, I encourage you to try something else. Switch it up. There are many ways to read a text, so try a bunch of different things. Then again, that's a fox speaking.

Nobody reads it all (but you ought to remember it).

Imagine an old-fashioned English professor. Imagine that professor scowling as he reads about my preparation methods. "Drawing comics?" he scoffs. "That's not reading!" Whatever, Professor Oldface. There are a lot of things I didn't close-read studiously in a leather-bound chair with a glass of scotch, but I did read everything in some fashion. Even better, I remembered it.

I prepared for this exam with two key beliefs about memory.

1. Imagination is a relative of memory. I tried the many methods above to make everything meaningful to me in some way. Sometimes that meant memorizing the spoken word of Milton, and sometimes that meant drawing a comic for the Faerie Queene. To wit: Make, then remember.
2. Repetition is memory. I am a complete convert to the notion of spaced repetition. It's a proven method, so I'll confine my remarks to my experience. In the candidacy exam, I used the program Mnemosyne to space the repetition of concepts, and I also allotted time to review material that I'd forgotten. I spent most of this morning reviewing things I'd already read, and I'm glad for it.

The else.

I haven't spoken yet about the emotional strain of the exam process. I've had a couple experiences like the exam, and each time I get really frustrated a week before. But one or two days before, I'm pretty damn beatific. A week out from the exam, I still had a broad range of preparations I could have chosen. It's a hard time to be a fox. But a day out, you've got to put your head down like a hedgehog. "Alea jacta erit" is a fun play on words I learned this semester: the die will have been cast. By the time that you're within striking range of the exam, you'll either be prepared or you won't. The die will have been cast.

Stress is not your enemy. Stress is your GPS: it can point you in a direction, but it isn't always right. Unless you have a diagnosed case of depression or anxiety, I believe the best solution is to journal or meditate on the causes of your stress, and try to apply that stress to your exam preparations. And most importantly, make sure that you evaluate your stress based on the best available facts, and that your evaluation reflects the values you truly hold.