take my comprehensive exams

At long last, Dr. S approved my long nineteenth century reading list. It’s five pages long, and I’m really wondering how I’m going to get it all read. However, I’m almost done with my British modernism list. I think another month’s worth of concentrated effort will allow me to get that list done and out of the way and give me enough time to write a boss set of notes to review. So now that that’s under control, I’ll be meeting with Dr. I to work on my postcolonial theory list. And I have pitifully little read. I’m meeting with her on Monday, and I’m hoping to get through those last 90 pages of Orientalism (the current bane of my existence) by Monday morning.

I also have my last meeting with Dr. F (head of my committee and in charge of my British modernism list) on Tuesday afternoon. I’m to discuss innovative narrative techniques. Unfortunately, this fills me with a vague sense of dread, as I’ve never been really good at discussing innovative narrative techniques. I’m much more of a examine the plot kind of girl myself. Here’s hoping I have enough time to dig up some good secondary source material to help me out!

My long nineteenth-century reading list is 4 pages long! That’s a lot of reading (and I’ve still got to add a couple of more things)! I’m meeting with Dr. S, the committee member in charge of this list, on Thursday afternoon. I hope she’ll let me take a bit off.

I talked with Dr. F, my committee chair, and we’ve decided on tentative dates for my exams—August 18, 20, and 22. I’ve got about four and half months left to study and there’s still so much to cover. It’s just hard to get a lot done when I’m teaching two different classes because preparing, grading, and teaching take a lot of time!

Perhaps (and this perhaps is filled with lots and lots of hope) a deadline will enable me to get even more serious about my studying.

After speaking to a few of my colleagues who had recently taken their exams, I now know that the thing to do is to set weekly reading goals for yourself. So here are my goals for this week:

To read:
H.G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau
Edward Said, Orientalism

Also To do:
Find more non-fiction sources for my long nineteenth century British literature list, and more secondary sources for both my British modernist literature and long nineteenth century lists.

mini-meltdown number two today. I wish I could stop stressing and just read, but it’s just not that simple. Not when you’ve got to take detailed notes of everything. I’m going to be a horrible nervous wreck if I don’t stop stressing out. I really need to make an effort on my goal to stress out less.

a mini-meltdown just now about how I’m going to possibly get all of this reading done by August. Luckily a friend talked me through it and reminded me that I can in fact do this all of this reading and pass my exams—hopefully without any rewrites.

with another member of my committee yesterday. While this one went really well (which is good because she’s a bit of an intimidating person) she added a ton of stuff to my nineteenth century British literature list, which included another eight or nine novels, another five plays, a ton of poetry and contemporaneous non-fiction, not to mention a number of secondary sources and she’s keen to add more non-fiction and secondary sources. Needless to say, I was feeling a little stressed when I left her office yesterday afternoon. However, I remind myself that I’ve chosen this life. If I want my PhD, if I want to continue to teach at the university level, this is something that I’ve got to do.

So since my exams are tentatively scheduled for the end of August, I’m going to set up weekly goals for myself of things that I need to get read. So, even though it’s Friday, here are my reading goals for this week (to be completed by Sunday):

• H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine
• H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau
• Excerpted chapters of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the
  Species and Descent of Man
• Thomas Henry Huxley’s Prolegomena chapter from Evolution and
  Ethics
  These are all relatively short (and while all of this is on my 19th century British Literature list this is the reading that I need to finish for class on the 1890s that I’m sitting in on)

Keep your fingers crossed that I remain a sane and friendly person throughout this process. Seven months and counting until my exams….

with the chair of my doctoral committee. The good news is my British Modernist Literature reading list is in way better shape than I thought it was. The bad new is I still need to find a ton of secondary sources, literary criticism, and literary theory. However, she gave me a lot of good leads, so I don’t think this will be such a hard task. Reading all of this will be though. We also talked about scheduling my comprehensive exams some time toward the end of August, either right before school starts or right after. I’m trying to decide which one is less stressful. However, I think having a set time to take my exams will help give me structure in my studying.

Tomorrow afternoon I have a meeting with the committee member who’s heading up my Nineteenth-century British Literature list, a woman who I both love and fear all at the same time.