Shonell in TCR Land

I recently learned that I passed my qualifying exams: the day would be September 9, 2011. It was a hot day, and I had been waiting 11 days, on pins and needles, awaiting a call from my chair. As I typed…no, I won’t bore you with the narration of the big day, but I will say that it was in fact a big day. I’m too exhaused to feel the magnitude of the moment, but not too exhausted to talk about the process of getting from Point A (about the time I began preparing for Quals) to Point B (getting the “big day” news). It’s not a process I necessarily recommend, as it was full of pitfalls and zaniness, but I suspect that people who have gone on this journey have found pitfalls and zaniness to call their very own.

To say there is a Point A is a bit…awkward, for lack of a better word. After all, the education you received up to the point of “Qual Preparation” is a preparation of sorts; however, I like to have anchors in my writing; therefore, Point A is the anchor I use to begin this journey.

Point A, for me, began in February. If you’ve checked out my Ph.D. Dreamline, you know that my reading list was approved in February, and so that’s when I began reading in earnest for the qualifying exam. In the beginning of this journey, I was a dynamo. I examined my reading list and began ranking works by their importance. Those that I thought were dire to the cause, I organized to read first, those that seemed important but not vital went second, and those that might not be necessary for the exam but would prove to be relevant for the actual writing of the dissertation went last. Because my goal was to take my quals in late August, I knew I had about five months and some change to read and prepare. I want to highlight some things that occurred by breaking this time into sections.

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February to Mid-May

This was Optimum Reading Magic Time for me. I was reading three to five books a week and one to three articles a day (except Sunday). There was a week or two during that time I was getting through a book a day. This maniacal, determined time actually is what saved me and helped me in getting enough read to feel confident (as you’ll see shortly). During this time, while I read, I took many notes in the books, but I also began cutting/pasting paragraphs and sentences that intrigued me and wrote a little something about each regarding a role it might play in the dissertation. I had organized a set of folders, one for each of the sections of my reading list, and in those folders were a master document of all notes, all the articles read for that section, and various snippets of thoughts written while away from the computer that I input later. There is this word we throw around to our students a lot, context. Reading with context in mind is extraordinarily beneficial. My mind was constantly thinking qualifying exam and then the larger dissertation, and so I was always reading to see what might be vital for the exam and what could be beneficial for the dissertation. After this about three-month span, I had read close to 100 articles and a little over 40 books. That was pretty good; however, my approved reading list had 107 books and 117 articles on it, so while I made major headway on the articles, I was still under 50% read in books. Was I nervous? Not really because I had organized my reading list into three levels of importance and had read most of the works that were considered dire to the cause.

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Mid-May to Late June

You know how life sometimes gets in the way of the best laid plans? Yeah, well, life did get in the way during this time. I was dealing with the world around me and with a major bout of depression that pretty much left me useless to anything or anyone. I can admit now, now that I passed the exam, that during this time I did not read. I could not read. And I felt horrible about it and questioned whether I should push back my qual date. I believed in being fully prepared. Thing is, I had no idea what “fully prepared” even meant for a qualifying exam, and with the mental space I was in during that time, I didn’t trust myself to say, “I want to push back the qualifying exam date.” I wasn’t sure if making that statement was a fact that I truly did need more time or if it was my insecurities getting the best of me. So, when my chair asked me how things were going, I said, “Great” and kept it moving. Although I did not read during this time, I worked hard to move my mind to THINK about what HAD been read and to think of those things here in the program that are deemed important to ask during a qualifying exam, such as methods, cognates, a field-related question, perhaps something about rhetoric. I started to do what I call mental or visual writing. It’s something I do when writing books, and it’s something I did a lot of during this “down” time. I began to think about these possible qualifying exam sections and mentally parsing what I had read into those sections. By the time this part of the journey was over, I might not have added another book or article to my “have read” list, but I could actually sit and write all the thoughts I had organized in my mind.

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July

July was a breakthrough month for me. God had been doing a mighty, mighty work on my mind, body, and spirit, and when July came, so did the lifting of my depression and my determination to make it to the qualifying exams on the original date.

I read…a lot…during this month, but in a different way from how I read previously. I looked at what was left on the reading list and organized the material again, this time compiling into another three sections: must read, must preview, must wait. I went through all the works related to methods and cognates and placed them in the “must read” and “must preview” sections, and then with what was left, I moved into the “must preview” and “must wait” sections. And then I read, but this time, my writing focus was on developing a narrative of the dissertation project, almost akin to what the first and second chapters (plus some of method chapter) might look like. I started at the very beginning, from what interested me about the topic, then started to write on the cognates and get pretty specific regarding how I rationalized using the framework and methods I selected.

By the time July ended, I had read much more…but not everything. I read a slew of articles during this time, about two or three a day, every day. As for books, I had a little strategy. Those that I considered “must reads” did not get read from cover to cover. I selected what I thought was the most important chapters for my work and read and took notes on those. Those that I considered “must preview” were previewed extensively, but there was not one chapter that I read fully. I looked at intros and conclusions, headers, graphics, beginning of paragraphs, etc. Once I previewed, I did a write-up of the book and logged that write-up into the spaces I thought it might be pertinent. Those books that I considered “must wait” did just that–wait. And they are still waiting. I didn’t feel bad about having not read these works because my initial foray into reading including those top works I thought absolutely necessary. February through Mid-May was like listening to a musical artist’s entire discography; whereas, July was definitely when I picked up the artist’s greatest hits album and soaked in the bits that were awesome.

I will admit, I was still so nervous and unsure, but because I was productive, I was satisfied.

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August

The last Friday of July, I talked to my chair and said, “Well, this is the last month, what advice do you have for this time?” He told me to not read. To stop reading–unless I found something that was so absolutely awesome and vital that it became a Read-or-Die type of situation. He preferred I take the time and write, and was happy to learn that I had been doing that all along. He reiterated the types of questions that might be asked and said it would be a good idea to write based on those types of questions. The Monday before the talk, God has whispered the following in my ear: “Trust that you know.” That Friday, while talking to my chair, his last piece of advice for me was, “You know, at the end of the day, after all the reading and writing, you have to trust that you know.” With that confirmation loudly heard and claimed, I committed myself to believing that I did in fact know, and set about to do more writing.

It was about this time that I transferred all of my Word documents into Scrivener (Mac/Windows) and began organizing the texts and my new thoughts into sections according to the types of questions that might be asked. As I set out to write to these topics and questions, I found that I couldn’t do it. They all intertwined. In the end, I returned to narration and explained how methods connected to my cognates. And then I wrote a piece on major lines of research and discussion in the field of technical communication. And then I wrote a piece on major rhetoricians that could be used to further develop the project. Writing like this enabled me to cull together a document well over 25,000 words. These documents would prove vital to the qualifying exam itself.

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Qualifying Exam

Every good story needs that point of return, that moment when the main character is face to face with its arch nemesis and must fight to the death (OK, not really death) to obtain his/her want, desire, goal.

The Monday before I took my quals, I met my arch nemesis: my back. I was in excruciating pain. Half the time, I couldn’t walk, and most of the time, I was heavily medicated so that I wouldn’t just be a blubbering, pained mess. I refused to call and postpone the exams until I felt better. This was the moment. God said it. My chair confirmed I needed to trust that I knew, and pain or no pain, some writing was going to get done.

At 8 a.m., the day the exam began, I woke up, went to my computer, received the e-mail for my questions, read the questions, and went, “I think I can handle this.” And then I promptly went back to bed and slept another three hours. I refused to stress myself–and besides, the stress would come later.

The first day of the exam, I outlined and drafted two of my questions. I was pretty confident about them and put them to rest until revision time.

The second day, I had to go on campus for orientation, and most people, upon seeing me and learning I was in my qual period, asked, “What the hell are you doing here?” I eventually asked myself that, too, because with orientation and a few other campus activities I had to deal with, once I returned home, I promptly crashed, and day two went by with no work being done.

The third day, I hunkered down and wrote my answer for the third question, then went back to questions one and two and revised.

The fourth day, I was stressed. No, I was Stressed. No, truthfully, I was S-T-R-E-S-S-E-D! The fourth question threw me for a bit of a loop. And this is where another piece of advice kicks in–a

piece we tell our students all the time–be open to thinking about your work in various ways. This question was on methods, and although I was not a master of the subject, I was very confident that the material I had drafted during my writing time would illustrate to my committee that I knew what I needed to know–for now. However, the question was worded in a way that stumped me. I blame this partially on the medication, partially on exhaustion, and partially on the pressure of it being the final day.

Several times during the course of the day, I tackled this question by outlining it, then pulling from my material, then refashioning my material, then rereading and rereading the question and at about 1 a.m. on Monday morning (the exam was due by 8 a.m.), I thought, You know what? I know how to answer this question, but for whatever reason, I can’t answer it in the way I know the committee might want me to. So, I went to Plan B–I wrote the response that I believed would show them that I knew my stuff. I might not have answered the question directly, but after reading my response, I was sure I had given enough for my committee to know they didn’t have to worry.

The exam needed to be at least 6,000 words. It was suggested 10k might be looked at as a limit. All my professors know that I am the person who likes words and will use a lot of them in a paper. Not once have I written a paper that even closely adhered to a word count suggestion–despite the fact that I have always worked SO HARD to do so. This qualifying exam proved no different. My exam ended up being just under 14,000-not including references.

I don’t want to conclude this section with the massive word count of my exam, so instead I’ll end with this: the writing you do in preparation for the quals can be SO vital. I didn’t open one book, double-click one article, flip through the pages of one textbook while working on this exam. All of my content came directly from the notes I took and the writing I did leading up to the exam. This lowered my anxiety level considerably because I didn’t have to run around, looking for books and hoping I still had those I borrowed from the library. So I would definitely suggest writing to the topics that might be covered in the exam and writing in a style that assists you in letting the words flow.

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Post-Qual and the News

Honestly, the week after the exam, I didn’t even think about it. The new semester had begun and I was just so happy to be able to pick up the massive piles of books that littered my living room and dining room floors that I didn’t have time to think about it. When one of my good Ph.D. buddies, who took the exam a few days before me, received her “pass,” I began to worry. I calculated how many days it took for her to get her response, and thought the longer I wait to hear, the more likely it is that I failed. I had begun to accept the realization that I could actually fail although to be honest, I think “accept the realization” is a stretch of the truth. If I had failed, I was so out of Lubbock. Would I have continued with the program? Probably. But I would not have stayed in a place where people could SEE me and with people who knew that if no congrats e-mail came through then that meant I didn’t pass. I openly admit to not being close to being mature enough to deal with that. And thankfully, I didn’t have to pack and flee in the middle of the night. I passed. And all was well that day. I have yet to fully feel it yet. I’m too tired to, but I know at some point, when I have a few seconds to think quietly, there is going to be a lot of screaming and crying going on…and it will be all good.

I want to end by saying I would NOT have made it this far without the support of my chair and my committee. I picked my chair because he and I share a lot of the same qualities. We are organized, we are structured, we like game plans, we like setting goals and meeting goals, and it doesn’t hurt at all that I can “let my hair down” and be me and he be cool with the myriad of personalities that might peek out to say hello. For me, my chair didn’t have to share all my research interests or even some of them. That person had to be interested in my work and be a person quick out the gate like me…and that he is. The professors who round out my committee were just as vital because each of them knows me in a way that will only help make this dissertation strong, solid. One of my members, for example, knows that Shonell is prone to flights of fancy. Although she may have great ideas and write really well, sometimes, she gets on a point that’s just slightly to the left or right of the actual topic or purpose of a work. That person is KEY to my focus on this project. He knows this weakness, is actually quite intimate with this weakness having read many papers of mine, so he knows this could become a sticking point to me. The fabulous woman who rounds out my committee is someone who is well-versed in feminist theory and in research methods, and so I know she will be keeping me on point in those matters. If my methods are weak, the work will be weak. With her, I know I have someone on my team that will be making sure methods are done and done well.

Because of each member, I feel very confident on the hoops that hover before me, waiting for me to jump through them.

The qualifying exam was a ring of fire.

I believe the revision of my IRB proposal and approval of the full proposal will be a ring of blades. We shall see.

And because I always love a good Wordle, here is my qualifying exam, wordlelized: