Ph.D. candidate!

I passed!! I spent two and a half hours talking about things. The right things, apparently. Although at the time I was annoyed that they weren't asking me about the crap that I had studied and stressed over for weeks. No, instead they were asking me about friggin kinase domains and expressing kinase dead mutants! Gah.

This morning I decided that the best analogy for a qualifying exam is skydiving. You want to do it, or at least part of you wants to. And you crawl into the plane (= grad school), knowing what you're in for, and that it's scary. And then the whole ride up in the shaky plane (= first 2 years), you're thinking, "good god, what did I get into." Then you get to the point where the four-point harness is the only thing attaching you to the guy sitting in the plane (= 2 weeks before qual), and you're scared. Very scared. And stressed. And every imaginable permutation of "what the hell am I doing?!?!" goes through your head, and then the guy pushes you out the plane and you're falling (= qual starts). You proceed to "freefall" for awhile (= during the qual, except that it ain't so easy and it isn't fun). And the whole time you're just praying that your parachute opens eventually (= your brain remembering things).

Turns out, taking a qual or skydiving, at the end it's a huge adrenaline rush and you're done and moving on. Only difference....I would actually like to skydive again.