Jack Sheehan

What I Do
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How I Do It
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My Thoughts
Quals. Comps. Prelims. No matter what you call them, the name alone is enough to strike fear into the hearts of would-be PhDs everywhere. But what really is the qualifying exam? This depends heavily on your program, but it can vary from an actual eight-hour written test to a presentation and oral examination. In our department, it consists of a 15-page report and a subsequent oral exam that lasts around two hours. Quals are scary, but they're also extremely exciting. As I have quickly learned in grad school, the odds of getting the concurrent undivided attention of three or more faculty members without a department-backed reason are basically zero. In this way, quals are a unique chance to get feedback on your research from experts in your field. Don't get me wrong, I spent plenty of time stressing before mine—I don't think I'll ever forget the feeling of working into the early hours of the morning the last few nights leading up to the exam. However, by the time the actual presentation started, I was more excited than anything else. With all this in mind, my biggest piece of advice for preparing for quals is to love and believe in your research. :) And don't panic!

Just as the exam can take many different forms, so too can your research preparedness at the time of quals. In my experience, there are three main groups. One group is made up of students who have already completed one or two smaller first-year projects and are now outlining their primary thesis work. The second group of students came into grad school with a specific project in mind and have already made considerable progress on their main work. The third group, on the other hand, spent their first two years in the planning stage and have barely even begun any "actual" research. This group can feel especially scary because a big part of quals is demonstrating your competency to complete the rest of your PhD research, and you may feel like you don't have anything to back up your proposed work. (I, of course, was a member of this third group.)

My Proposal
With all this in mind, I chose to make my quals report more similar to a funding proposal than a research article, emphasizing the work to come and why I think it's both important and doable. Halfway through writing, I found out my FINESST application had been accepted; this was a huge boost since my quals report was basically a more detailed version of this proposal. In order to still emphasize my research preparedness within the structure of the proposal, I packaged the work I'd already accomplished as a proof of concept experiment. For a short summary, you can see the accepted FINESST proposal abstract here.

You can find my full qualifying exam proposal below:

In the Fischer Lab, we have a piston-cylinder hydraulic press with a storied history (see it here). The frame of the press is one of the originals used by Harvard professor Percy Bridgman, who was a pioneer of high-pressure physics and the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1946. His work directly led to the creation of the Committee for Experimental Geology and Geophysics at Harvard and helped create the field that would come to be known as mineral physics. Among his students during this time were Francis Birch, who went on to lead Harvard's geophysics program, and Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project.

While this press used to contribute to Bridgman's discovery of countless polymorphic transitions and thermodynamic parameters up to 5 GPa (~150 km depth), nowadays we use it primarily to synthesize metal samples for our diamond anvil cell experiments. Even though helping make my somewhat crude metal alloys may be a far cry from its glory days, I'm sure if the frame could talk, it would express happiness to still be working and not left to collect dust somewhere.

When I joined the lab, it had been so long since anyone had needed to use the piston-cylinder that everyone who had used it had graduated. We were then faced with the silly and laborious proposition of having to relearn how to use our own press. During this process, I made the manual below to try to ensure that this would never happen again. It goes through all the steps in excruciating detail, from making your sample cell assembly to building the stack to maintaining the press. This was my first "project" in grad school, so I am extremely sentimentally attached to it. Although this is designed with our specific setup in mind, I am putting it here in the hope that maybe someday someone will find it valuable when they are scouring the internet for outdated EUROTHERM control panel manuals or ENERPAC oil changing instructions the way I was. Every time we get a new student, I give them this manual and leave them alone to figure out all the steps. Afterwards, I update the manual to better explain anything that they found confusing. I'll keep updating this version here to reflect those changes! All diagrams, photos, and instructions are by me. The Replacing Parts page is under construction.