Old Crow.

I can bet that most of you beyond my immediate family are a little confused by this sort of blog title. Old Crow? What is this you speak of?

Old Crow is whiskey. And believe it or not, this Tuesday after quals, I was the girl carrying the bottle.

(this is the dungeon, by the way...the place all the first year students gather to study and program).

I think I've mentioned it before, but this was my grandfather's favorite brand of whiskey (see Wikipedia: "Old Crow is a brand of relatively low-priced Bourbon whiskey..."). We all took shots of it at his funeral party, and received a handle of it from him the Christmas after he died (with his initials on it in his special serif font). I didn't have my bottle in Illinois when I turned 21, but thirty seconds after I got home for the summer, my brother started calling for shots. And man...it's gross. Terrible, awful stuff (although, notably much improved by coke, which was the main consumptive vector while my grandpa was ducking/pheasant hunting).

One of the things my grandfather said was "work hard, play hard." And that's why, after a long year of studying, and a reallllllly long qualifying exam, this is what happened:


That, my friends, is an empty bottle of Old Crow. (obviously not finished by myself alone---no worries, mom!)

So...now that I've gotten the celebration out of the way, what are quals?

Quals is the shorthand terminology for "qualifying examination" - a fairly grueling day-long test you take in graduate school to be officially considered a doctoral candidate. Our written quals take place in June after a full first year of taking classes, and our oral quals take place next summer and consist of our thesis proposal to our thesis committee. Since the MIT Bioengineering program is split up into two tracks, there were two tests administered: one to the folks in the bioengineering track, and the other to those in the applied biosciences (ABS) track. The former is much more mathy/equation based, so I chose the latter track. I spent the past two weeks studying with other members of the ABS track, going over class notes, review sheets, looking through textbooks, etc...we also hypothesized lots of different question possibilities based on the faculty members who are writing our exams (see a workup here by one of my fellow first-years).

And then the day of the test came. All that studying basically meant...nothing. This isn't meant to be a bad-mouthing the department post, rather a comment on the slight obscurity of the questions we were asked. I realize that the goal of qualifying exams is to see if we can think about all that we have learned and synthesize it in order to apply it to new or not yet understood papers, issues or problems. That is, after all, the goal of grad school as well.

However, I think there is a difference between that and having a question on a cycle that was taught in two slides of one lecture. It is intriguing to think of how to optimize these tests to really test our breadth of knowledge, and the best we could come up with is that we'd need an entire week of four questions a day to show what we really learned.

If you're interested in chatting more about these, I do not have the exams, but the questions were about differential equations representing a circadian cycle, tuberculosis toxin negative feedback loops with a translocating transcription factor, and iron homeostasis in prion diseases.

All in all, it was quite the exam. (and seriously, I hate blue books. Give me plain white paper anytime). We'll find out sometime next week whether we officially passed or not.

In other news, one of my professors has been in the hospital since last Saturday (almost two weeks). He went into cardiac arrest and is still in a coma. He's in stable but critical condition, so people are optimistic but unsure right now...