choosing oral board exam committee members
In some–if not many–graduate programs, you have no say over who is on your oral board (a.k.a. qualifier) committee. Some graduate school programs don’t even tell you who is on your committee until you walk into the room on the day of your exam. Painful.
But if you have the option to choose who is on your committee, plain and simple pick the people who will take it the easiest on you. Sounds so obvious, right? From my perspective, the oral board exam maybe very sensitive in picking out the flunkies who couldn’t possibly make it through graduate school but the oral boards are unfortunately not very specific. That is, I know an unexpectedly high number of smart graduate students who did not unconditionally pass on their first time–usually because they made the wrong choices for committee members or because they were so dedicated to their research that they blew off studying for the board exam. The oral boards are hard; you can be asked about pretty much anything the committee members feel like asking–so why not make it as easy as possible for yourself? I knew one guy who wanted to make it “challenging,” so that he would feel like he really “earned it.” That was probably one of stupidest things I’ve ever heard. If you’re the kind of person who wants a challenge, then you are probably not the kind of person that the oral board exam is meant to weed out. So get grip, pick easy committee members and go back to your research. What is more likely to happen is that your advisor will suggest someone who is not easy, or even worse, has a reputation for being a hard ass. I was talking to a friend of mine recently, and she finds herself in this situation. If you find yourself in this situation, do and say anything that you have to convince your advisor otherwise. And if it comes down to it, forget convincing, just tell your advisor that you’ve chosen Professor So-and-So instead. Choosing hard ass oral board exam committee members is like having one strike against you before you even go to the plate. Why would you do that to yourself?
Some obvious ways to recognize good committee members:
- Track record for asking easy questions (talk to older graduate students)
- Does NOT have a track record of busting balls (as important as asking the easy questions)
- Likes you/has had good interactions with you
- Likes your boss
- Is NOT on bad terms with either you or your boss (people: I can’t stress this enough–if someone is pissed off at your advisor, they WILL take it out on you)
What I sincerely hope doesn’t happen is for people to send comments taking the moral high ground about how it builds character to have a difficult oral board exam. That’s ridiculous. The oral board exam is meant to weed out flunkies. For the rest of you who work hard, just get through it and go back to your research. That’s it. To appease the moral authority, I will say that studying for my oral board exam was actually a great experience, though painful. There will actually be no other time in your research careers where you can take a month off and study/reinforce all of the principles of science, biology, whatever that you are supposed to know. It’s amazing and I urge all of you to take advantage of that month. BUT, do not make the actual exam harder on you than it has to be. Find any means possible to weasel out of making it harder than it has to be. Spend your time worrying about your research, not obscure facts about a biochemical pathway that you will remember until exactly 30 seconds after your exam is over.
In our graduate program, every year one person would receive a conditional pass, which meant that the person did not actually pass but had to do some kind of remediation. Basically, that person’s ass was at the mercy of the committee chair-person. (Last I checked, it had been a good 6 or 7 years since someone failed outright and was kicked out of graduate school). Anyway, forget about make-ups, you DO NOT want to be that guy–the remedial graduate student. You know, the one who has to explain to all of his classmates why he didn’t exactly pass but will pass after doing the thing for the guy who wants him to read the twelve original articles on the experiment that showed that thing and then present a report to the other guy who… Blah blah blah, by then I’ve already pinned you as the class dunce. Don’t be that guy. If you make educated decisions about your committee and this still happens to you, then it sucks to be you but there was nothing else that could have been done–and yes, I have seen it happen. But, if you pick hard committee members and this happens to you, don’t say that the Mudphudder didn’t give ample warning. I’ve seen many a good graduate student go under the train just by making poor choices for oral board committee members–don’t be one of them.
