Rice commented about the concept of exams-as-heuristic. I can’t believe I didn’t mention this before, but lo, I haven’t. Maybe I just wanted to wait and come out the other side and see if I really did learn anything. And maybe I’m just superstitious, and don’t want to jinx myself by talking about the actual questions of the exams yet.

Here at Minnesota, I’ve been heavily encouraged to use the exam process to further my research. The hope is that every answer will be either a draft of a dissertation section or a draft of an article. With the exception of a couple of questions concerning Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero, all of mine skew toward specific things I’m working on. There’s a couple that I really hope I get asked, because they’ll help me start to write about the grant I worked on in the Med School over the summer. The rest skew toward my interest in hellenistic and distributed authorship.

The process of preparing has also been helpful for me. As close readers may recall, I originally found the entire concept of qualifying exams to be very rude. I was bitching about it to L. at lunch one July day, and he flared up right back at me. I should value the process, he said, because it’s the one chance you get in your career to sit relatively still and situate the field and texts in your mind. All this reading was for me. And in the end, it has been. No matter how I come out the other side of this in a month, I have a much better understanding of the larger conversations in the field and of the development of my subfields. I understand what they have to do with my specific interests. I had to pick up a couple of theorists that I didn’t cover in coursework, and I learned that I can read difficult, unfamiliar things primarily on my own* and generally figure them out. I know what other resources to look for and what questions to ask. And I finally figured out how to read in a somewhat intelligent manner — how to skim, how to seriously read a TOC and index. How to drain a book quickly.

So yeah, I buy the whole exam-as-heuristic notion. I hope that’s even more true in a few weeks.

*Glory be to Reading Group, though. That’s another post I need to write.