Workflow: Comprehensive Exams Reflection, and Hours Spent Per Essay
11:00 p.m. on Friday, April 9, as I was working through my last exam essay.
I’d complete it and send it off five hours after this was taken.
This is a brief reflection on my comprehensive exams experience this past April, as well as a breakdown of the number of hours I spent on each essay (3 practice ones, and 3 actual exam essays). I’m sharing this because, admittedly, I do find tracking and sharing numbers on this sort of thing kind of fun, but also because I imagine it could be helpful for students taking similar exams. If you’d like to know the details of the exam process I went through, you can refer to the section “PhD Comprehensive Examination” on the department’s PhD Program page.
If the grisly details are not of interest, the most you’ll need to know to get through the rest of this post is that students must write 3 essays over the course of a week, with rest days in between, and each essay must be completed and submitted within 24 hours of receiving the question.
3 Bits of Advice
Before I start poking at the numbers, here are the three top pieces of advice that come to mind. Remember, though, that even within the exact same English PhD program as myself, your experience will vary depending on your advisor and the composition of your committee.
Also keep in mind that I am still a graduate student myself, and so my own critical distance here is limited.
At any rate, the things I find most important are:
3–4 weeks before taking the exam, transition from reading to reviewing your notes and drawing connections between these works. What big picture claims or ideas do you have about the archive you’ve assembled?
Rest as much as possible, before and between essay writing. I found that three days of continuous thinking and writing, even with days of rest in between, was much more physically exhausting than I expected.
Spend some time thinking about the relationship between your reading and the dissertation project to come. Were I to do this over again, I would dedicate at least 3 days to this alone.
Comprehensive Exam Essays, By the Numbers
A few weeks prior to taking the exams, I completed three practice exams following roughly the same format as the exam itself (i.e. spread out over a week, and with twenty-four hours to complete each one). This was immensely helpful—it meant that when I was sitting down in front of my computer on Monday of exam week, I wasn’t completing this sort of task for the very first time. It also meant that I had more material to draw on this past summer, while I was drafting my prospectus.
Still, as much as I tried to simulate the actual exam conditions, writing the exam essays themselves was absolutely more stressful. Though I think my practice essays and actual exam essays are comparable in terms of quality and their utility in helping me develop my thoughts, as you can see in the table below, most of the exam essays took longer to write.
On paper, 1–3 hours more spent writing may not seem like all that much, but is much longer when you consider that that’s going to bed 1–3 hours later than you would have otherwise.
Compiling refers to the process of exporting the essay out of Scrivener, adding citations through Zotero, and then formatting the essay for delivery. It does take me 14–27 minutes to do this all, but I consider that time well-spent and would not change this part of my workflow.
As I look back on this, two things jump out at me:
First, I may spend too much time outlining. Outlining is a security blanket for me—it helps assure me that the essay will ultimately be completed, and that I have a plan for how to get there. But while I don’t find it consciously constraining—I never think of a new idea and then say “No, I can’t do that! It’s not on the outline!!!”—I do wonder if it leads me to write in a way in which I’ve sketched out the end destination before I’ve actually, thoroughly, thought my way through to it. Ultimately, I think it’s only actually writing that can do that, followed by reflection and revision.
Second, for reasons I can’t explain, Exam 3 took a really, really long time. The question was certainly challenging, but I don’t know if it was truly so challenging that it needed sixteen hours of work. Ultimately, I stayed up until 4 a.m. Saturday to complete it. I’m really happy with how it came out, but I question whether, at some point in drafting, I may have gotten myself so stressed out that some relatively insignificant thing grew to take up great importance and just suck up a great deal of time. It reminds me of when I used to edit video late into the night, and would look up after an hour and a half of trying to find just the right cut or clip for a brief and not at all pivotal moment.
I do think I would chalk up the duration spent on Exam 3 to cumulative tiredness over the course of the week. A hazard of working while tired is that, as time goes on, I make less judicious decisions about what to work on and for how long.
Were I to do it over again…
Following the above thoughts, I’d dare myself to outline a little less and try to get that initial draft out faster so that I could work over at least some of the ideas a bit more.
I say this half-heartedly—twenty-four hours is barely any time to really work over a thought in the manner of a true, real revision. But that is something I’d want to try, and I may keep this in mind for my subsequent dissertation chapters.
Finally, I’d try and spend a lot more time thinking about my dissertation project in a big picture, holistic sense. This is something that would need to happen before taking the exams. Months later (and one prospectus and one dissertation draft chapter in), I do feel that my project has a form, direction, and argument to it. But having a sharper sense of that earlier on, and in relation to all the works on my lists, and, more broadly, established and recognizable fields, would probably have made the process of writing the exam essays just a bit smoother.
If you yourself have exams coming up, best wishes to you for a smooth and productive experience!
It is almost—almost—fun.