WARNING: NO TALK OF STARS BELOW.

JUST ME. AND COMPS.

SO PROCEED AS YOU WILL.

I’m still a bit high off of my first experience of comps yesterday. I’m also somewhat unable to relax, at least not quite yet — I’m going to the pool as soon as it opens in two hours, but I have time to kill. But I want to decompress a bit concerning the experience — especially since I know I would’ve liked to have read about someone else’s experience before starting myself. So who knows, future compers: this might be akin to your experience, it may be totally foreign. But here’s mine.

For those of you who do not attend the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas, we take a series of three day-long “comprehensive exams.” You’re supposed to take them when you’re done with coursework, but since our rather asinine requirement-system (I’m not scared to call it asinine: it is, as you’ll see) makes it impossible to finish coursework in two years (unless you take FOUR seminars a semester or fork out a ton of money to take a summer independent study), many people, myself included, take them when they still have a few ‘minor’ classes to complete. Basically you take them when you’ve finished all of your important classes. You select three advisers, who will also presumably go on to form 3/5 of your dissertation committee, and move forward on developing three ‘topic areas’ to which you will devote yourself for the next few months. After you finish the comprehensive exams, you spend anywhere between 3 months and 2 years developing your dissertation proposal — basically a large roadmap to your diss — and after you defend it orally to your committee, you get to be “A.B.D.”: All But Dissertation. Then you get to write the dissertation. Then you get to defend it. And through all this, you look for a job. The flaming hoops never end. [I apologize for the redundancy, friends in Ph.D. programs, but sometimes we fail to realize that our lingo is crazy and our lives seem one giant study session to those on the outside.]

Different advisers in our department have various ideas as how to structure comprehensive exams. Some professors see a comps list as an outline of all developments in the field — and ensuring that you could teach a class on that particular field in the foreseeable future. Others believe that a comps should be more closely tailored to your specific dissertation ideas — and, lucky for me, all three of my advisers fell in the ‘others’ category. Thus I came up with three topics: Stardom within Postclassical Hollywood, Star/Celebrity Theory, and Stardom within Television. Then I came up with long lists of books and articles to read, submitted them to my advisers, they suggested a few more, I read through, discarded some that weren’t of use, and came up with a final list — each was approximately 12-13 books and 12-13 articles.

I came up with my lists in late May, then spent the summer reading, note-taking, synthesizing, etc. I took approximately three weeks off to write a chapter for a collection, visit my brother in NYC, eat lots of food, retreat to the Northwest, and come back and flip out about being behind. I caught up, it was fine, I was fine. I scheduled my exams for this week — Monday, Wednesday, Friday. You can take them wherever you’d like, so long as you can receive the email. You’re allowed all of your notes, the internet, whatever. The bar exam this isn’t.

Unlike the bar exam, ‘boards’ for med school, or Ph.D. ‘qualifying exams’ — which are common after the first year in a Ph.D. program, especially those where they don’t require an M.A. for acceptance, as they do here — these exams aren’t designed to weed out those who aren’t cut out for Ph.D. work or to be lawyers or doctors. If you’re in the program and survive to your second year you’ve already been ‘weeded’ out. I fully realize that it is possible to fail these exams, but I don’t know of anyone who has — maybe a few have been asked to rewrite one. The point is, the value of the exams is completely in the process of reading. You spend three days regurgitating your knowledge on the page, but you’ve spent three months basically reading all of the books that will make up the lit review of your dissertation. You’ve tricked yourself into doing some of the hardest background research of the entire process. Ultimately, if you’ve actually done the reading, you’re going to do fine. And it’s also not our final exam — our dissertation, and its final approval, functions far more like the bar exam. If you can write that dang thing and get it through your committee and stomach the oral defense, then you’re fit to be a true professor.

I, for one, feel like I’ve learned more over the last three months than the last two years. That’s illusionary, but it feels that way. It’s the fact that it’s concentrated, it’s all stuff that very directly interests me, and it all fits together — because my comp areas are so closely related, I read something for one that directly fits and compliments knowledge that I’ve gleaned from another book. [In contrast, reading in seminars is purposely all over the place -- there was very little overlap between the seminars I took last semester in Feminist/Queer Film Theory and History & Memory]

In the days leading up to the exam, I had finished all of my lists, so I began reviewing, rewriting, charting, etc. All things that would help organize the piles of knowledge in my head. I also met with each of my advisers one last time to nail down approximate questions: one of my professors ‘gave’ me the question straight up, one told me almost exactly what he’d be giving me, and the other told me she’d write several question based on topics and ‘themes’ we’d discerned and I’d be able to choose from them. So, again, it’s not that they’re trying to make me fail, or trick me, or catch me off guard — they want to guide me towards success.

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C-DAY #1:

I went to a nice Hollywood movie the night before to get me in the mood. Woke up at 7 a.m., as our graduate secretary sends the email containing the first question at 8 a.m. Coffee, air conditioning, lots of stand-by liquids (I like to drink things while I write — not alcohol, just carbonated beverages, etc.). And then, at 7:20, the email comes! Totally caught me off guard, as I was expecting to look at my email at exactly 8:00 a.m. and see it magically appear in my inbox. But whatever — I’d have 40 extra minutes. It’s just a small Word Doc along with instructions to email it back no later than 5 p.m.

The questions were exactly what I was expecting. I’ve thought about whether I should disclose the teacher and questions, and still don’t know how kosher it would be. Suffice to say that this certain professor teaches Classic Hollywood industry, and my first question asked me to a.) trace the evolving value of star through the postclassical period (1948-Present) and b.) perform a historiographic survey of the literature on stars and their relation to Hollywood. In other words, what approaches do people take to talk about stars and Hollywood, and what are the drawbacks and benefits of each approach, and which approach do you favor.

The first question was obviously going to take longer than the second, so I set a deadline to finish the first by 1:00 pm, then spend the rest of the afternoon finishing the second, with 30 minutes to read over them both at the end. The rest of the day is a blur. I turned on ‘Freedom,’ but I didn’t really need to — I’ve never feel so concentrated, so absolutely clear-headed and in the moment of writing. It was surreal — I know that I paused to eat cereal and get more fizzy water, but I don’t remember it. I do remember writing pages and pages of material, and somehow, when I looked back over them at the end of the day before sending them away, they weren’t horrendous. They lacked panache, perhaps, and immaculate style, but they were coherent, cogent ideas linking from one to the next. And for all my elaborate charts and notes, I barely touched them. The process of making the charts was enough to put that information into my head — which I knew would probably be the case, as I internalize information by writing/typing it. It was all there, and it all flew onto the computer screen.

I had a mild freak-out at about noon when I realized that I was still in the mid-’70s (right around Jaws and the blockbuster) and needed to get to 2009 in one hour. I ended up glossing some rather important developments — um, shouldn’t the Telecommuncations Act of 1996 deserve more than 2 sentences? — but I finished, and, since I had given such ample time for the second question, had an hour at the end to go back and flesh out some of the more egregious glosses.

I wrote more than I should have — the suggested total page number was between 20-25 pages — and ended up with 29 double-spaced pages. CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT? I wrote TWENTY NINE pages in 9.5 hours? Well I emailed it in at 5:01 and became immediately cognizant of the huge adrenaline rush that I had been riding all day. It was like emerging from the zone. I felt incredibly happy, almost blissful. It was doubtlessly the most intense academic experience of my life — more intense than the SATs, the GREs, or any test in college. Try to imagine taking five blue book finals in a row and you’ll kind of get what I was feeling. Of course, part of the novelty of the feeling was rooted in the fact that humanities grad school involves a lot of very gradual, even incremental achievement — slogging through drafts and turning in a paper to profound anti-climax. But I also knew that I’d be in a daze if I stayed in my apartment, so, as planned, I went to yoga from 5:30-7:00 with one of my favorite teachers. And I’ve rarely been more focused in yoga — totally held my freestanding headstand for two minutes. It was like a continuation of the awesomeness.

Went home, had a gin and tonic, ate the dinner I’d prepared the night before, and watched latest episode of True Blood. Again, more awesomeness. The only odd feeling is the expectation of doing it all again — two more times. I can only hope that I have similar feelings, or at least no negative feelings. Any advice from former comp-takers on how best to proceed (or mental spaces to occupy) would be much appreciated….but now I’m off to the pool. All day.