Jan 8 is the day of reckoning

January 8 is the day of reckoning. No one in our study group will be home for Thanksgiving, Christmas, or New Years. Oh, the sacrifices we make in the name of making sufficient academic progress. It's hard for me to explain to good friends and my family back home what it means to take the prelim. For that matter, it's hard to explain this anomaly of prelims to other Sociology graduate students at other institutions.

The prelim is frequently the topic of stress when I get together with my other Sociology grad friends. We question the motives and benefits to sitting in a room for 8 hours (with breaks in between morning and afternoon questions) and writing to four exam questions with no notes, no internet access, not talking or discussion.

The upshot is that we will feel really "bad ass" if we pass. We will be ready to teach in the subfields we are studying for, since studying requires knowing all the major sociological contributions to the debates happening, specific cases, and methodological issues. And, we will have produced and accumulated several hundred pages of notes and summaries of our extensive reading list.

The downside is immense stress of trying to memorize main arguments, author names, and year published, and how things connect in a question and being able to make a coherent argument under time constraints. Other places have the advanced graduate student (frequently after the Masters thesis project was successfully defended) create a tailorized (or Taylorized? ahahaha, I crack me up) reading list with her committee of faculty, once those readings are completed, an oral and written defense are scheduled, and it happens with, based on what I've heard, less loss of sleep and friendship gatherings forestalled. And, it happens on your own time, whereas in our esteemed department, you can take the prelim only in January or August, typically.

Most faculty who are serving on our prelim committees did not have to go through this horrifying/enriching experience. Most are none too thrilled with the system we have going at Wisconsin, but no one is shocked or appalled enough to overturn the system and replace it with a paper prelim option, like the kind that the Human Development and Family Studies department offers (where your prelim papers essential become your introduction and literature review of the dissertation).

I've been thinking about what types of rewards to give myself after taking the exam. This is even before hearing the results of whether I pass or fail. I just want to reward myself for this extra time taken out to study on top of a heavy academic and civic engagement workload.

1. Lots of sleep!
2. Catching up on Season III of Veronica Mars on DVD.
3. Asian Zing bbq buffalo wings at BW3.
4. Catching up on all personal emails.
5. Holiday in California to see friends and my family back "home".
6. Write more dissertation fieldwork grants.
7. Leisure reading.
8. Exercise again.
9. Think about how to fix the global financial crisis and about all the possibilities that having a new president elect will offer for the US' reputation abroad in foreign affairs matters. Oh, about the global financial crisis fix, I believe that's going to be on the exam, I kid you not.