The part of all this that I’ve been dreading the most is the orals, which are scheduled for mid-December. There’s no clear consensus about them when I talk to our ABD folks and recent grads — descriptions range from ‘the most traumatic experience of my life’ to ‘pretty laid back’. So I suppose it depends on the person and the committee, like always, but I can’t help but expect the Spanish Inquisition.

I’m a pessimist by nature, though. (Johndan has a great line about pessimists never being unpleasantly surprised.) Working with a team full of habitual optimists over the summer has made me slightly rethink this position. (Slightly!) And two bloggers recently said things that made me reconsider my dread of oral exams. Derek views them as a chance to apply duct tape to spaces in his writtens. And Billie commented that orals would have given her a chance to clarify some spots in her exams, which were entirely written.

Orals as Shoring Up sounds much better than Orals as Torture. I’ll try to hold on to that.