So you're probably wondering how my qualifying exams went. Well, so am I. I will know my fate Wednesday night at about 9pm. Here's how it went:

The first session was the Math, Chemistry, Physics, and Biology questions, of which we only had to answer three. Chris, Karen, and I had done a thourough review of chemistry so I felt confident there. I hadn't studied physics much, but an email mysteriously appeared that contained a description of the question. We weren't sure if we could trust it, but it was better than nothing. And besides, it suggested that the question would be a circuits question, in which case I was golden anyway. Math I hadn't studied for at all because the math questions are always either impossible or easy, so I just let the cards fall where they may. In the event that the math question was difficult, I had studied some biology. The last 2 years questions in bio dealt with DNA and we figured that they wouldn't hit that one again, so we focused on cell cycle and cell structure.

Well, the math question was hard. Solving some sort of second-order differential equation in spherical coordinates. And to boot the question was totally sequential, meaning that if you couldn't solve the equation then you couldn't do any of the later portions of the question. So after half an hour of kicking it around, I resigned to doing the bio question instead.

But first, chemistry. There were three parts. The first two were easy and I aced them. The third one was about the color of compounds in solution, and they forgot to give us a periodic table which made the question really hard. As a result I sort of half-assed the answer and left it. Talking to Ken afterwards re: the missing table, he indicated that perhaps the grading on that part would be somewhat lax. So that's good news...

Physics. The email was right on. It was a circuits problem. And it was so much easier than we were expecting. We were banking on them not asking an AC circuit problem, because that's harder than the sorts of things they generally ask. But we figured they would at least have a time-varying problem... But no, they asked a DC statics problem. Basically Ohm's Law was all you had to know.

Really simple. Comically simple. The funny thing about this question, aside from the fact that it was earmarked for an hour and it took me four minutes, was that it was written as a word problem (something involving jumpstarting a car whose battery had gone bad). This was enough to throw off a whole host of the PRC students, who didn't know what "jump start" meant or what placing a battery "across a motor" involved. I felt sort of bad because it was clearly just a language problem, but the question was SO simple that to explain it to them at all would be to give the answer away to at least one part (drawing the schematic).

And this brings us to Bio. Perhaps it was karmic retribution for us knowing the physics question in advance... It was a DNA question again - the one topic we hadn't studied at all, and after my demonstrated inability to solve the math question, I had to answer this. It wasn't pretty and can basically be described as me bombing it. I don't know jack about recombinant DNA or gene cloning, and I had to write about the processes in detail. So anyone who knows anything about bio and reads my answers to this question is probably at least chuckling if not weeping.

The second session was for 101 and 102 (Nuclear Physics / Quantum Mechanics, and Fundamentals of Engineering). I got lucky here in that Molvig wrote the 101 question and I had him for the class so the questions were ones I was used to seeing. Also, Todreas wrote the 102 question and I took that class with him twice.

Unfortunately, 102 is impossible to study for and I just don't know that stuff. And when I got the question in front of me, it was clear that I didn't know anything about engineering. So I bombed that one too.

101, on the other hand, was basically an easy question. It came in several parts most of which I did admirably on. There were a couple places were the question seemed so simple that I convinced myself that there must be a trick and changed my answer away from the correct one in order to incorporate some ficticious bullshit that I invented right there on site. So that made me mad, but I still think I did reasonably well on this question.

The third and final session was for 51 and 55 (Interactions of Radiation with Matter and Radiation Detection and Shielding). Here we had another ace up our sleeve because Professor Chen had basically given away the topic of the 51 question to Chris. Chen had gotten in trouble for writing the same question two years in a row in 1998 and 1999, so he wrote a new question last year (which kicked my ass) and this year he pulled an older one from the stack. When Chris was asking him questions about some of the older exams that we were working through, Chen saw one of them and asked "what year did I ask that?" This, of course, was a dead giveaway.

So we studied NMR and magnetics problems like mad. And we were right. The question was very similar to one we had gone over every night for a week before the exam, and the only new part was something Evan had derived for us on the board. So I flew through the 51 problem and probably aced it. This is good because it's supposedly the hardest question and the one most relevant to what I do.

The 55 question came in 3 parts. The first part was simple and I aced it, but it was only worth 10% of the question. The last part was about Monte Carlo, which I have an unfair advantage with having recently taken Professor Yip's MD/MC course. So I did quite well on it as well. The second part, however, which was worth the bulk of the points, covered Bragg-Gray theory which is easy and I should have known it but I blanked on it and probably got that part mostly wrong.

So, if I had to grade my answers they would look something like this:

Chemistry: A-
Physics: A+
Bio: D-
101: B
102: F
51: A+
55: B-

Add to this the fact that they grade leniently for people taking the test for the second time around, and that Molvig has to be at the meeting and seems to want me to pass, and I feel cautiously optomistic. But with two total bombs in there it could easily go either way. We'll see day after tomorrow.