Difference between revisions of "General Advice"

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Every year, between 20%-40% of students do not pass UCLA's comprehensive exams. Not passing the comps is embarrassing. Don't be unnecessarily embarrassed. Firstly, your colleagues probably know your results. Information gradients quickly equilibrate and with them dissipate any future potential for embarrassment. Therefore, don't avoid your friends and colleagues for fear of being asked about your comp results. They want you to do well and are likely to offer help and advice for next time. Secondly, some students who have not passed UCLA's comprehensive exams have gone on to become leaders in their field (including an assistant professorship at MIT straight after receiving her PhD). Therefore, not passing is not a measure of your innate ability, but merely an instantaneous measurement of your training status. Therefore, do more training (for example, like [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUWBbepsdmY Ueli Steck]). The best training strategy for your attempt will probably involve some modification of your last strategy. Therefore, try to identify your mistakes from last year.   
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Every year, between 20%-40% of students do not pass UCLA's comprehensive exams. Not passing the comps is embarrassing. Don't be unnecessarily embarrassed. Firstly, your colleagues probably know your results. Information gradients quickly equilibrate and with them dissipate any future potential for embarrassment. Therefore, don't avoid your friends and colleagues for fear of being asked about your comp results. They want you to do well and are likely to offer help and advice for next time. Secondly, some students who have not passed UCLA's comprehensive exams have gone on to become leaders in their field (including an assistant professorship at MIT straight after receiving her PhD). Therefore, not passing is not a measure of your innate ability, but merely an instantaneous measurement of your training status. Therefore, do more training. Take  [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUWBbepsdmY Ueli Steck], for example. The best training strategy for your attempt will probably involve some modification of your last strategy. Therefore, try to identify your mistakes from last year.   
  
  

Revision as of 03:27, 15 November 2014

Every year, between 20%-40% of students do not pass UCLA's comprehensive exams. Not passing the comps is embarrassing. Don't be unnecessarily embarrassed. Firstly, your colleagues probably know your results. Information gradients quickly equilibrate and with them dissipate any future potential for embarrassment. Therefore, don't avoid your friends and colleagues for fear of being asked about your comp results. They want you to do well and are likely to offer help and advice for next time. Secondly, some students who have not passed UCLA's comprehensive exams have gone on to become leaders in their field (including an assistant professorship at MIT straight after receiving her PhD). Therefore, not passing is not a measure of your innate ability, but merely an instantaneous measurement of your training status. Therefore, do more training. Take Ueli Steck, for example. The best training strategy for your attempt will probably involve some modification of your last strategy. Therefore, try to identify your mistakes from last year.


Some good training strategies include:

  • Give yourself enough time. You are tasked with practicing 6 quarters worth of course material in one quarter's time. Consider taking that time and doing research on the back burner.
  • Be careful not to fool yourself. It is tempting to read rather than getting one's hands dirty. Sakurai forebodes that "the reader who has read the book but cannot do the exercises has learned nothing". The best preparation for comp problems is practicing previous comp problems (UCLA's previous comps, previous finals and midterms of committee members, comp question and answer books by Lim, Chicago, Princeton).
  • Do problems, carefully. One may be tempted to prefer quantity over quality in order to collect a large canon of completed questions. However, it is important to find a balance between quality and quantity of problem practice. A quality problem session involves working on the problem for 30 minutes, checking one's answer with the solutions and then going back to the question without the solutions as aid. If one does not check the answers, one is merely revising the things that one already knows rather than learning new things that one does not yet know.
  • Leave your comfort zone. Learning has an uncomfortable activation potential. Overcoming this potential means leaving one's comfort zone and accepting the fact that one does not know something. When you transform this confusion into curiosity, learning is fun and motivation intrinsic.
  • Work in small groups. Working with peers helps with motivation, problem debugging and is mentally stimulating.
  • Be optimistic. Research has shown that optimism motivates for long term reward rather than short term reward. Therefore it is important to remain optimistic to fight procrastination. Similarly, your confidence boosts your psychological immune system.
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