If there’s one thing that characterizes my current phase of the PhD journey, it’s the feeling of perpetual jetlag. It seems like I’m constantly in transit, either for work or university-related tasks. It’s a marathon, with no end in sight.

As such, one must do the following as graduate students have done forever seemingly: comprehensive exams. You take this step to matriculate from PhD Student to PhD Candidate. Yes, there is paperwork (your Dissertation Chair and your committee must agree and sign specific forms to this fact), and yes, you must be present for the oral part (at least most of the time; there are exceptions, I hear). But before you get to the oral part, you need something to defend. Enter the written exams.

The written exams go like this: you get eight hours to write a paper to answer a question. There are three questions. They are around your area of study. You must do this in a week. You can do them in three straight days (insanity as far as I am concerned, but my boy Dereck did just that; he is a beast of a scholar), or you can space them. I spaced them a day apart.

And it crushed me.

The questions weren’t surprising (all things I’ve studied or am in the process of doing as part of the dissertation), so it’s not like I had to learn a whole new stream of literature or whatnot. That said, eight hours is nothing when you must write and argue your position. I tend to over-write as it is, so the next thing I know, I’m 35 pages deep on what has gone from answering a question into a systematic review.

Very exhausting.

So you do these three questions, and on a Friday night, you collapse into a ball of questioning (e.g., what did I just write) to bargaining (e.g., that paper made sense, you made sense, yeaaaaa) to general panic (e.g., oh my god I’ve just thrown out three years)—the stages of comprehensive exam anxiety.

Then you wait. You wait to defend that in person. And if you’re insane like me, you just work through it, jetlagged and racing the globe to try to make ends meet, slowly losing your hold on reality.

Then you find yourself sitting in a room no idea how you got there or what day it is, and your chair and committee go through each question and posit questions concerns, and ask for justification. Defend your position. What would you change now that you’ve had time away from it? Reverse the assumption; what method would you use?

Then they kick you out of the room and talk about you and your writing an answers.

Thank goodness, in the end, I found myself officially a PhD Candidate with a solid start on my dissertation’s first chapter (exam question 1) and last chapter (exam question 3). This is the secret sauce of comps (at least with amazing committees) that I didn’t know: nothing is wasted.

It all comes together in the end. Or so I think. Onwards to the next step. The PhD Proposal Defense.