At last, the D-day came and went by. Finally the PhD prelims are over. Luckily it went of pretty well, and so, now I am officially an A.B.D. student (All but dissertation). Going through the process made me realize how useful the prelims are for somebody like me. Apart from getting a couple of interesting suggestions from the committee members, this was an excuse for reviewing the basic materials science fundamentals once again (something, which I admit, I am a bit weak in).
Years of regimental studies in BTech and MTech and I drifted in a state where exam preps meant:
1. Analyzing the last 6 years question papers (by the time I was done with Tech degrees, it was down to 3 yrs)
2. Pinpointing the key areas and cover 70% of the class notes accordingly. No books allowed, at any stage
3. Invent mnemonics for stuff I found tough.
4. Set aside a time period @ 4 min per class note page (now, I was conscientious in taking notes and attending classes - so on an average, had 200 pages of notes, which translated to 140 pages of readable notes for semester exams. Preferably set aside a time that is around 10 hrs before the exam. I.e. exam at 8.30am implies, start studying at 10.30pm the previous night.
5. Write the exam and forget what I read.
Naturally, all these contributed to my weak fundamentals. Prelims was a different cup of tea. With all my labmates working in a totally different area from mine, I had almost no idea of what to expect. So, other than focusing on research, it was back to basics for me. I didnt read up as much as I wanted to, but even then, managed to cover basics of mechanical behavior, thermo and kinetics, some aspects of solidification, microscopy, x-ray diffraction, etc. Not the best I could have done, but a fairly decent prep by all means.
Well, the prelims went well and are now done and dusted with. Time to look ahead towards research, afresh.
