katakat.com bytes from a participant observer

Mid-January to mid-February was the time for my comprehensive (comps) exam. I had 28 days to complete three questions selected by my comps mentor. It was supposed to test your competency for the field, however, the field being EDUCATION in all its hugeness, the questions covered topics I knew almost nothing about. So I spent most of the time researching. Good to have faculty status at my home institution so I could take the books home from local university libraries! My online university library took at least a week to get me an interlibrary loan article, so I wasn't about to try for a book (3 weeks). Better to do the searches online and pick up the books locally. I handed the almost 40 page paper in on Wednesday, Feb. 18th. That's actually 10 pages short of the limit. I'm now waiting for the blind readers to mark it up and get it back to me for the 2 week re-write period. Or, if pigs fly, I'll actually pass it and avoid the re-write period. Either way, I'm now on pins and needles waiting for this phase of the doctoral process to pass. Then I can get on with the dissertation stuff. I was lucky enough to be able to take off work for the entire comps period by compressing much of my off-duty time into that short calendar. And since I kept on top of my work email during that time, life wasn't too unbearable when I got back to work.