More Big Steps

I have finished my classes, established my committee, and been published. This week I took yet another major step forward in this whirlwind they refer to as graduate school - I scheduled my first committee meeting. Whohoo!! It really doesn't mean a whole lot, but I only plan to have maybe 4 meetings my entire time here (you have to have them every 6 months once you start them and I want to be out in 2 years), so one out of 4 being done is pretty good.

People (namely my mom) always ask me how graduate school works. I often fail to recognize that people who have never gone probably don't know, so I will tell you. Once you finish your 2nd year, you establish a graduate study committee consisting of 5-6 professors who will guide you through your dissertation (the 100+ page paper you write at the end). Usually they are experts from a mixture of fields that will help you in some unique way. You write a grant proposal about what you intend to do your dissertation research on. Your first committee meeting is where you present your proposal (aka research plan) to the committee. The committee then tells you everything you have planned incorrectly, how they would change it, how much additional work you need to do, etc. You go back and rewrite the proposal (sometimes just revise but most people have to completely start from scratch), making sure to incorporate everyone's suggestions to the best of your ability. Then you have what is called "qualifiers." This is where you present the final plan for your dissertation work to the committee. During this meeting, the committee members are able to ask you any question about anything in biology - whether it's even closely related to your project. If they deem that you are worthy, you pass qualifiers, which means you move into candidacy - in other words you are now a candidate for a PhD (I get kind of confused here because I feel like this means that nothing I did prior to this point was working on a PhD but I disagree). Once you are a candidate, you get a bunch of extra priviledges on campus but that's really about all. At this point you just slave away your dissertation work, meeting with your committee every 6 months to update them on your progress (meetings are a lot less stressful at this point from what I understand). You take about 3ish months to write your dissertation. Once it's complete and the grad school has looked at it to make sure you followed every asinine rule about margins, fonts, paper type, paper color, copy number, etc., you do a public and private defense. The public defense is basically an hour long presentation of the research which has consumed the past 4-7 years of your life. Oh, and every single person who is in anyway affiliated with UAB is invited to attend. The private defense is between you and your committee. It is at this point that they decide whether you should get your degree. If they say yes, you must do final revisions to your dissertation and submit it to the graduate school, where it will be bound and published in the library and you get to go to your hooding ceremony and graduation (I don't know why PhDs get hoods, but I think we ought to get something after years of hard work).

So that's basically graduate school in a nutshell. Any questions? :) All of that to say that I have made another huge step towards graduation. Now I am working feverishly on my proposal so I can get it ready before the big day - March 24th!!!!!