The big day finally arrived, after 42 days of studying during which my body went through 41 sleep/wake cycles. All eight of the Ph.D. candidate students got to our meeting place very early with coffee, food, drinks and even changes of clothes to be prepared for a long 8 hours of testing split by a one-hour break. The clothes changes were necessary because the room temperature could fluctuate and you didn’t want to be too hot or cold during the exam. We each were assigned a room to ourselves and we were forbidden to meet with or talk to anyone during the exam. Signs were posted to keep people out of the eight exam rooms and there was no proctor or monitor. We were to turn in the exams by the end of four hours or risk failing. Dr. Miller gave us the exams and we were on our way to completing one of the last steps needed to obtain a Ph.D. from Michigan State.

The first exam was cardiovascular physiology. I liked this subject and was very well prepared for it. I wrote fast but tried hard to keep my handwriting legible. I am not the neatest writer and the examiners needed to be able to read it. Each test was read by two people; the expert in the field and someone from a related field on the comprehensive exam committee. The committee consisted of 7 people; a chair and 6 expert representatives from the fields being tested. One of the examiners was Dr. Jump and he was generally known by the graduate students as lacking in a sense of humor. It became almost a running contest to get him to smile or laugh. None of the graduate students were claiming to have gotten a chuckle from him.

For lunch I was afraid to leave the building for fear of getting hit by a car and not being able to complete the afternoon session. So, I brought sandwiches, snacks and drinks for lunch. I ate kind of numbly and stared at my condensed cheat sheet notes. I kept my cheat sheet notes in the lab; no one brought notes or texts into the room during the test. I felt good about the cardiovascular test, but was worried about endocrine-reproductive physiology in the afternoon. All the hormones and changes that occurred with pregnancy and reproduction were always hard for me to follow. After my studying I could actually draw graphs of how the female reproductive hormones changed during the monthly cycle and then name the hormones and cite the cycle times. I pretty much just memorized all of this and could draw a diagram of it and then explain it off the diagram. Fortunately, that was enough to convey the information even though the details of that knowledge for me, did not go much deeper.

When I got into the endocrine-reproduction exam at 1:00 P.M. on Monday, they asked for the hormone changes during a woman’s monthly cycle and I drew my picture and described what I had memorized. I regurgitated the answer I knew they wanted to see in the exam and went on to the other questions. All the questions were relatively long essay questions. Some of them were incredibly vague and open-ended. For example one question went something like this: “Diabetes can be caused by a lack of insulin. Discuss.” There are entire books on this subject, but based on the points allotted that question it was going to get 30 minutes of writing and then I would move on to another question. I tried to give each question the amount of time, thought and writing, that it deserved, based on how much it was worth in the test. Many of the questions could have been discussed for hours. So I spent 30 minutes talking about insulin, glucose, and diabetes and moved on. I would have needed about 16 hours to answer all the questions to the level that I thought they could be discussed, but all of this had to be done in only 4 hours. This was a big worry for me and it caused me to write faster and faster, the legibility of my handwriting getting worse and worse.

Time ran out on the endocrine-reproduction exam and I raced to the office to turn it in before 5:00 P.M. Sharon the assistant was there and I gave it to her. I was not the last person to hand in my exam—Sharon told me there were still two people left. I was so tired and stressed that I just nodded and walked away without finding out who was running later even than me.

I went home and called Ann. I told her about the exams and she commiserated with me. She asked if she could come over to share dinner with me but I said no. I really needed to get started on the next two exams. She was disappointed. I ate quickly, while all of the questions and my answers to them ran through my head. It was like an endless tape of questions, answers all repeating over and over in my mind. I could see the questions and my answers to each one.