After I submitted my written qualifying exams, I mostly didn’t think about them at all for 10 days. I returned to my essays, though, to prepare for my in-person defense, held two weeks after I sent in my answers.
The defense (sometimes called a viva) is a meeting of the PhD student and all their committee members to discuss the written exams and is the moment when the student learns whether they pass or fail the exam.
To prepare for my defense, I printed out the exam questions and all of my answers and got them bound at Office Depot (for $4!). I re-read my answers several times to re-familiarize myself with what I had written, annotating in the margins what my arguments were and how I moved through the arguments.
I reverse-outlined my answers (writing an outline of the finished paper) and annotated the questions to make note of how I addressed each part of the question. Drawing on my experience with each committee member, I tried to imagine what questions they might ask and prepared a response.
As a food scholar, I love to bring food and my intellectual pursuits in close dialogue and I decided to make a focaccia for my defense (pictured). I selected ingredients that brought together my four answers and my committee was thrilled to have something to snack on during my defense.
In my program, the quals defense lasts for one hour, immediately followed by a one-hour dissertation proposal defense.
First there was an opportunity for me to speak about the answers. If there was something I realized I had forgotten, or upon further reflection I wanted to amend or correct, I had the chance to say it then. This is most useful for people who write their qualifying exams in-house, closed book, with four hours per question. Because I had taken a week to write my exams, there wasn’t anything I realized after the fact I wanted to change. So I used this time to talk about how my experience of writing the exams had gone and how I felt my answers connected to each other.
Then, each committee member asked me questions about the answer(s) they were responsible for, we went one essay at a time in the order the original questions had been sent to me. Some questions were admittedly softballs – “How does this apply to your own research?” – and some were tougher – “You didn’t discuss the anthropology of eating in your section on the anthropology of food. What differentiates these two literatures?” They asked me questions about why I had answered the way I did, how I had come to develop the arguments I made in the essays, and why I marshaled the evidence in the way I did.
Because I had spent so much time thinking about these texts and my essays, there wasn’t any question I was unable to answer. But navigating the Q&A is a skillset – I was glad I had gathered plenty of experience in Q&As about my research and writing from many conference and brown bag presentations in my first three years of my program. There will always be questions you don’t expect, or don’t have the information to answer on the spot. Finding ways to speak to what the question-asker was getting at even without having the exact answer is a skill you will need throughout your academic careers, so practice it if you can before you get to the quals defense!
Then I left the room for a few minutes while they discussed my answers and defense. I came back in, and was told I had passed quals with honors! Huzzah!
*Apologies for the delayed post – I drafted this before my defense and after I passed I went so directly into celebration mode I never posted it!*
