So what did the quals mean anyway?

It has been a year and a half since my cohort took the quals. Stressful times, they were. Back in the first year, the quals were like six swords of Damocles hanging over us. They were the priority. And no matter how many seniors told us that “It’s going to be fine,” “it will be over soon,” it was hard to be reassured. Personally, I kept looking at the quals as the summit of a grand mountain: passing them would mark an accomplishment and give a signal to everyone (including myself) that I was ready to do a PhD.

We put in a lot of work in the first year: Taking notes extra-carefully, putting in additional effort for the problem sets, spending all those hours to solve practice qual papers. Fast forward to the future, and here we are. What is the meaning of all the time and effort that we put in in our first year? I would like to share my experiences about that.

I had thought that finishing my quals and gaining all that knowledge would mean I could immediately transition to research. But that was not true for me. I chose to do research in glaciology: understanding and modeling ice flow dynamics in Antarctic and Greenland. But that was a completely new field for me: I had never learnt mechanics or thermodynamics and I did not know what a Reynold’s number was. While the core classes provided a useful background, I realized that there was more to learn. For me, productive research did not start until a year after the quals, once I had completed an insane amount of mechanics and geophysics classes and developed a comfort zone for this new field.

One thing I was sure about, though, was that I would never forget the things I learnt in the core classes. I had spent uncountably many hours on those ungodly problem sets — it must be worth something right? The human brain works in strange ways. For the past year I have been helping out a student with some of the core classes, and it forced me to look at the material again. I couldn’t solve a 308 problem set if my life depended on it. 307 is now a mystery to me. Even 303, something I felt really comfortable with, is just slipping away. I remember big pictures and ideas, but sometimes I feel that things are too vague in my head.There is a historical quote floating out there which says something to the effect of, education is what you remember after you have forgotten everything you learnt, and I hope that is true.

There is one aspect of the quals that I feel the happiest about. There are these flashes of memories — all of us standing around a white-board trying to understand a Walter problem, or sitting in the Green Earth Sciences Building and going over one qual paper after another. We were sharing notes, we were explaining things to each other, we were keeping up each other’s spirits. Shared trauma does create strong bonds, doesn’t it? I now have this amazing set of friends who I deeply care about and who I can count on. Strange and silly as it may sound, the quals were a factor in cementing these friendships.

The quals look very different based on which side of the bridge you are on. And it has been very interesting for me to think about how my thoughts on them have changed. If you resonate with these points, or if you want to share your own experiences, feel free to chime on the comments, or better yet, write you are article on The SVD!