budding scholar

We had 3 questions to choose from, which was less than we were expecting (we’d been told we’d have 5). They were harder than we expected based on all the practice questions we’d been given. I read through them initially and had a moment of panic, thinking that none of the preparation I’d done fit nicely into any of them. The first option was about the connection between research and policy, and the possibilities of research for guiding policy. The second one was about teacher quality, and policy involving teachers. And the third question was about charter schools, vouchers, and the decentralization/centralization debate.

I chose the first, thinking that it would be the best one for marshalling what I know, and it went well! I started talking about schools as social institutions, then talked about the purposes of education, then gave examples of research informing policy through the courts (the doll experiments ) in Brown v. Board of Education). Looking back at my notes now, I can’t believe I talked for more than 1/2 hour based on just these few lines–a few names, years, studies, and nothing else!

Afterwards we went to lunch with the whole POME faculty at the Berkeley faculty club, and then went for drinks at Triple Rock. We debriefed, talked about how we had done, which questions we’d answered, whether we felt like the questions reflected the coursework we had done this year (consensus: they didn’t). All in all preparing for them was the real value, not the exam itself. While this gave us some validation that we’re on the right track with our intellectual development, the real learning was studying together.

Hopefully the real orals can be as good of an experience. The next major program milestone will be the qualifying orals that we do after about 3 years. The first-year orals were just practice, a chance to talk under pressure, build relationships with classmates as we practiced, and show what we’d learned in this first year of the doctoral program.

One more thing done before heading to see this…

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 10th, 2007 at 6:10 pm and is filed under Program Milestones. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.