Having just finished my Qualifying Exams, I’m eager to share my process with anyone to whom it may be of use! There is no one right way to take exams, this is just how I did it.

What are Qualifying Exams?

Also called Comprehensive Exams, Orals, or Field Exams, Qualifying Exams are the last and biggest test of a doctoral student’s life. In the US system, you begin your degree taking courses and developing your plan for your dissertation research. To end this phase and advance to the actual writing of the dissertation, you take a massive exam on all the literature that is relevant to your field and project.

Quals are like a bottleneck – a point of extreme pressure on your journey that is designed to transform you, your brain, and your relationship to research and the field, so that when you emerge on the other side, you are ready to play with the big kids and do research of your own. These exams are usually very intense, but remember that your committee and department want you to pass because it looks bad for them if you do not pass.

I took my exam in Sociocultural Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. Each subfield of each department of each university will have different rules for this exam. In my case, I worked with my committee to compose four lists. Each list was on a certain area of literature and had 30-50 texts on it. Each list was the responsibility of 1-2 dedicated committee members, and the committee member(s) responsible for a given list 1) signed off on the texts on the list 2) composed the question for that list 3) evaluated my response to that question.

I had 8 days to write answers to 4 questions, each 10-15 pages in length. After 2 weeks, I meet with my committee for an oral defense where they pose questions and I discuss what I would change about the answers. At the end of that meeting, they discuss and decide whether I should pass.

You have to follow the rules of your department, but there is in many cases wiggle room.

Your first tasks in preparing for quals, which you should start doing as soon as you start your PhD, is to

1) learn about what the rules of quals are for your specific track

2) discover which rules are flexible in practice and which are inflexible

3) learn about how other people have taken quals and get their advice (talk to as many people as possible!)

Ask administrators, department coordinators, directors of graduate study, faculty, grad students in all of the years ahead of you about how quals work, what their experience has been, advice they would give to someone preparing for quals, and what usually helps people to succeed. Many rules that seem official in writing are actually flexible in practice; in my department you aren’t supposed to be able to take exams over the summer, and yet some people have done so (usually these exceptions just need approval from your committee).

Ask everyone you can about the creation of the lists, question design, studying, writing, and the oral defense. Even learning about the quals experiences of people in other tracks, departments, and universities can give you a sense of what is possible so you can tailor your quals to your strengths as much as possible. Before I took my quals, I estimate I talked to over 50 people about qualifying exams over 4 years, so I could have as good an idea as possible of what awaited me and how I could succeed.

How should I prepare for quals?

Finalize Your Lists Early

I recommend you finalize the lists as soon as possible so you can know exactly what you need to do to prepare. My committee advised that I finalize my lists one month before the exam, but I pushed to finalize with ~5 months left before the exam. I had read only about half of the texts on my lists before they were finalized, but it is not uncommon to have already read 90% of the texts in coursework. Because my department does not offer classes that match my research interests, I needed to read a lot on my own, so I wanted to finalize my lists early so I could read.

Once the lists are finalized, type up the full citations for each list in a separate document. Organize them by subsections and try to order the texts within the list in a way that makes sense to you and your topic (chronologically? grouped by lines of thought? going from most broad to most specific? geographically?)

Write Systematic Notes as You Read

You will need notes on all the texts on your lists to be able to synthesize the literature and write your exams. I began my reading phase by making a new document for each list with one page per text on the list. If I had systematic notes on the text (from an annotated bibliography, summary for a class, from my own notes etc) I dropped those notes into that document.

If I didn’t already have notes about a book or article, I (re-)read the text and wrote up notes on it that included: argument(s) from the text, research questions, methods, findings, chapter organization, and quotes I thought I might like or want to use. Some texts had a only brief paragraph of notes, and some had four dense pages, depending on the importance of the text to my research and the themes of the lists.

Plan out your reading time to be sure you are on track. I had 83 new texts to read and write notes on when I finalized my lists, with 5 months left before my exam. I planned out how many texts I needed to read per week and kept track of my progress on a paper calendar. When I fell behind on my reading schedule, I revised my plan and kept tracking. Some weeks I read only 2 texts, and some 21!

Part of the transformative process of quals is changing your relationship to reading and texts. When I needed to get through four books in a single day, I had to approach them very differently even from how I had read for my classes. I read extractively: hunting swiftly for arguments, key terms, and connections to other literatures. This meant I could absorb and move between many big ideas and topics in a day because I was not bogged down in the ethnographic detail. There were several texts that I thought, “Oh I need to return to this and really read it!” as I was racing through the pages. I made a note of those texts and now that quals are over, I can go back and give the book the time it deserves for my own intellectual journey and my research. But for quals, I only needed so much from the text and I prioritized progress for my nearer-term goal.

Discern when you do need to delve deep. Some texts (you’ll be able to tell which ones these are) are not skimmable. Foundational texts for the discipline, your list, or your research topic need careful and close reading. Probably 4 or 5 texts from each list were like this for me: I read them very carefully, had 2000 words of notes on them, and I knew they would be key to whatever question I was asked. These took more time, so I couldn’t do 4 in a day! But most texts do not need this level of attention for this task.

Give Yourself Time to Synthesize

Once you have systematic notes on all of your texts, you need to be able to bring them together. As you read, you’ll be making connections – make note of these! “This reminds me of Silverstein’s Indexical Order” is a great thought to include in your notes document!

I aimed to finish compiling all my notes with one month left to go before the exam, but I was a bit behind after buying a house and finished reading with only two weeks to go. This still worked out for me, but a month for synthesis would have been nice!

When I had read all of my texts, I wrote three possible quals questions for each list. What would I want to write about? What do I think these lists could address? I shared these questions with the relevant committee members. They had a variety of responses, ranging from “I like question two, I’ll ask you that!” to “Thanks for sharing, you’re on the right track!” to “This is not a quals question. A sample quals question might be….” This meant I knew if I was on track (or how to get there) and in some cases even allowed me to outline my answers before the exam began.

I printed out all of my notes (~220 pages) and got them bound at Office Depot (a spiral binding is $6). I love print, and it was great to get some time away from screens. I also like the idea of keeping these on my bookshelves for the future!

To refresh myself on the material, I went back through all of my notes in the bound books, annotating in the margins (what is the major takeaway of this paragraph?) to facilitate mid-exam skimming, and wrote at the top or bottom of the pages a one-sentence summary of each text.

Each of my lists had 3-4 subsections, so once I had finished annotating a subsection, I synthesized them in the cover page I had bound in front of that subsection. I drew mind maps, I gathered definitions, I made bullet points of the themes that brought that subsection together.

When I finished going through all of the subsections for a list, I wrote outlines for what I thought the question would be. For some lists this was clearer than others! But having an outline already written allowed me to fully bring the list together in service of a question, which is the goal of quals.

The Week Before: Rest

The days leading up to your exam, you need to prioritize rest. You can’t cram very much at this point – the preparation you’ve put in over the previous months is what will serve you. Rather than losing sleep and wasting energy fretting over your lists, look over your notes for a bit each day and then put them away. Use this time to eat well, sleep well, clear the decks for obligations you might have during your actual writing time, and to meal prep.

Writing the Exam

When my questions arrived in my inbox at 8:00 on the day that started my exams, I read them with my partner, and chose the one that was closest to what I had expected. I pulled up my prepared outline and I was typing by 8:03. That momentum was key for my confidence!

My exam was 8 days long, so I had two days per question, and my responses were supposed to be 10-12 pages, or absolute maximum of 15. My goal was to write a full draft (covering all points of the outline and at least 8 pages long) on the first day, and to revise on the second day.

On my drafting day, I tried to not let anything get in the way of the flow of words. When I didn’t quite remember a fact, I wrote a note to myself of what I thought it was and where to get it directly into the text and then typed “tk”. This is a trick I learned from my food journalist friends – TK stands for ‘To Know’ and is a highly rare letter combination in any words in English (if you are working with material in a language that uses ‘tk,’ then you might consider “xx” or “jjj” or some other series of letters that you can easily search for later). I needed to confirm a quote? TK. I wanted to look up the year of a publication? TK. I needed to get more detail on an example from an article? TK. This meant I prioritized production of text and didn’t get bogged down in finding details while I was in the flow. Cleaning up these TKs later is a low-energy task, the writing equivalent of putzing, and doesn’t take a high level of concentration.

At the end of a drafting day, I printed out my draft and set it aside for revision.

On the revision day, I read through the printed draft from start to finish. I marked up any errors I found from proofreading errors to word choice and addressed any lingering TKs. This is also when I wrote most of my introduction and conclusion paragraphs, because I was able to see the full shape of the sections and paper. I often moved sentences or paragraphs around, cut sections, or made additions to maximize the flow and logic of my argument. I made all these edits in writing on the printed draft, then typed them up and printed out the paper again.

The second time I revised the paper, I read it aloud. This is how I caught most typos and helped me improve word choice and flow on a line level. As I got to the end of the week, I revisited the papers I had finished earlier. I ended up reading each paper aloud 3-4 times.

My process in sum:

Outline -> Full Draft -> 1 Read-Through (detailed revision on paper) -> 3-4 Read-Throughs Aloud

Each day I worked from 8am to Noon, took one hour for lunch, and then returned to my desk from 1 to 5. I did not look at email until after 5 (most days…..). I didn’t have my phone in the room where I was working and I wrote over spring break so I had truly no other obligations competing with this time. My partner was in charge of feeding me, so I did almost no cooking during the whole exam. This was huge to be able to focus on just writing and resting.

Each evening after five I pretty much took off. I putzed in the garden, watched Top Chef, knitted, read mysteries, went for walks, called my mom, and occasionally worked on cleaning up my TKs. Having these evenings off and sleeping for 9 hours a night was key to my rhythm!

Here’s how I worked through my four questions (my themes were History of Anthropology, Economic Anthropology, Language and Food, and Anthropology of Europe). I ended up submitting a day early (Day 7) because revision went faster than I had expected!