Reflections from My Generals Exam

For personal reasons, I ended up taking my Generals Exam several months before the rest of my cohort. Therefore, I dedicate this post to my amazing and supportive cohort.

To my cohort:

As you all know, the Generals Exam is a rite of passage for students pursuing a PhD. Once you pass this step, you officially become a PhD candidate and have the blessing of pursuing your own independent scientific research. The Generals Exam looks different for different departments across different institutions. At the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, the Generals Exam has two components: a 7-page written dissertation proposal and an oral exam in front of three faculty members, none of which will be your advisor.

Since taking (and passing!) my Generals Exam a few weeks ago, I have taken some time to think and write some reflections about my personal experience. The purpose of these reflections is not necessarily to give advice, but to talk about what I learned along the way with the hope that these lessons will be useful to you as you continue on your own journey.

Your Health Comes First

Growing up, my parents drilled it into me that it is important to keep healthy habits in order to work well and work hard. Healthy habits range from getting enough sleep to eating nutritious food to staying hydrated and exercising regularly. I am still working on developing healthy habits, especially when it comes to regular exercise, but I did make a concerted effort to prioritize my health over my work as I drew closer to my Generals Exam. For instance, I made sure to get enough sleep even when I felt like I was not going to have enough hours to study.

However, the most helpful thing I did was to allow myself to be surrounded by a supportive group of people who were rooting for me. When it comes to doing hard work, I think that we sometimes have the mindset that we need to “hunker down and just power through.” There is truth in this statement. For instance, I had to decide to not travel to NC for a bridal shower the week before my written deadline. What I think we need to be careful about is to not have the mindset that “I need to crawl into my cave, where I can work and avoid almost all human interactions, and not emerge until I pass my Generals.” I believe that this can lead to feelings of isolation and, in many cases, helplessness. At the end of the day, it becomes emotionally harmful and counterproductive.

There is an old adage that says that it takes a village to raise a child. Well, it took a village to get me through Generals and it will be the same for you. I strongly encourage you to not isolate yourself as you go through your preparation for the Generals Exam. You don’t have to go through this process alone and, to be honest, you won’t strive if you’re at it alone. Identify the post-docs and senior graduate students who have skills that are particularly helpful to your project and seek their help. Continue to spend quality time with family and friends. Make an effort to recharge doing activities that you enjoy (for me, it’s crocheting). And don’t feel guilty about any of this!

Your emotional health is just as important as your physical health. Together, the two will give you the strength and endurance you will need to go through your Generals Exam.

Your Work Doesn’t Define You

Let me repeat that again: Your work doesn’t define you. Your worth as a friend and family member is not defined by your ability as an academic. Don’t get me wrong, you shouldn’t slack off but instead do hard work well and with integrity. You are more than the results of your Generals Exam or the number of papers that you publish.

I think that this is something that many of us struggle with, especially in academia where “success” is oftentimes measured by the number of fellowship/grants accrued or an h-index. However, this is an unhealthy mindset to have, especially as you prepare for your Generals Exam. This mindset can become a weight that stops you from moving forward because you’re afraid of failing… or a weight that leads you to overworking yourself to burnout.

I am worth more than how well I do on my Generals Exam, and so are you.

This is something that I needed to remind myself of as I prepared for my exam. Thankfully, I was surrounded by many people (many of which were you!) who helped me along the way, cheering me on while keeping me grounded on the simple truth that my work didn’t define me. There was great freedom in that as I prepared for one of the most important exams of my life.

Some Practical Tips

In the first section, I talked about the importance of maintaining healthy physical and emotional habits. Meanwhile, in the previous section, I emphasized the truth of your work not defining who you are. In this last section, I want to talk about what I did to prepare for my Generals Exam and also talk about things I would do differently.
The written component is a dissertation proposal that is supposed to model an NRSA application. This means that you are bound to 7-pages (not including citations), 11-point font, and 1-inch margins all around AND your proposal should include 2-3 specific aims that detail your and your advisor’s goals for the rest of your PhD program! In my experience, it was actually pretty difficult to fit everything within the page limit. It is for this reason that I recommend that you leave yourself at least 1.5 months to go through several drafts of your proposal.

I also encourage you to ask everyone around you to give you peer feedback. Importantly, you should make sure to ask people who are outside of your field! They will be the ones who will highlight things that don’t make a lot of sense. Our department also provides workshops for each student to receive personalized feedback on the writing. Take advantage of this opportunity. What this means is that you should try to avoid submitting your first draft to the workshop since it will most likely be incomplete and rough in many ways. I didn’t follow this advice when I was submitting my draft for the workshop, which meant that there were comments I received about things that I already knew I had to fix. My advice is for you to do this differently and instead submit a revised version of your first draft to the workshop.

It is also likely that you will have great project ideas but have difficulty tying everything together into a cohesive narrative. The same thing happened to me! It’s completely natural and is part of the process. I was able to resolve this problem by spending a considerable amount of time in my own head, walking around outside and just thinking about different ways that my projects fit together. Once I thought of the narrative, it was relatively straightforward to write everything down. However, it did take a while to get to this stage, so I definitely encourage you to leave yourself with enough time to just think.

Along with the written component, you will have to read, read, read. I won’t talk too much about this because I think that we all have different methods that work for us. For instance, I get headaches when I try to read papers off of my computer, but I know that Sarah prefers that method. We’re all different. Either way, I will tell you about what I did.

A new requirement in the department is to provide our Generals Exam committee with a reading list of 30 papers that are highly relevant to our work. I started to work on this list once I had a draft of my written proposal. My proposal had more than 30 citations, so I had to go through it and pick the papers I thought were most relevant. Then, I went to my advisor Ken and he looked through the list and pointed out important papers that I had missed.

Once I narrowed my reading list to the most relevant 30-ish papers I should *really* know, I bought myself a 3-inch binder and stored all of my papers there (in alphabetical order). I read through all of the papers by theme, using my favorite Mildliner highlighters along the way, and wrote down a one-page summary of all the papers in my bullet journal. These were the summaries I re-read the night before my oral exam as a final review. Here, I want to encourage you to allocate at least one month to carefully go through all of the papers. I only gave myself about 2.5 weeks which meant that I felt rushed, especially towards the end.

The oral component was the part of the Generals Exam I was most worried about. However, it ended up being the part I enjoyed the most! The oral exam is a wonderful opportunity where you will have the attention of brilliant professors in your field for 1-2 hours. The feedback you receive will be invaluable. I have 3 practical recommendations:

1. About a month before your oral exam, start a document where you start to write down questions that are fair game (e.g., What is memory reactivation?) and that you should definitely know how to answer. Share this list with your advisor and ask him/her for feedback. Add questions that come up while you read relevant papers. Then, actually answer these questions! This exercise will help you think about how you would frame responses and it will also highlight topics that need more study.


2. Schedule at least 2 practice talks in front of other graduate students (including people who have gone through the process themselves) and post-docs, preferably in the same room as your exam. This will give you a confidence boost on the day of your exam, and also highlight areas for improvement. I recommend that you schedule the first practice talk at least 2 weeks before your oral exam. I scheduled both of my talks within the 4 days before my exam which meant I didn’t have a whole lot of time to make changes.


3. Finally, take the time to make an aesthetically-pleasing PowerPoint presentation. This actually really matters, and it takes a lot of time, so don’t wait until the last minute to work on this. Whenever I needed a break from my written proposal, I would switch over to my PowerPoint and little by little it all got done. I am very attentive to details and have strong opinions about what makes a good PowerPoint presentation (feel free to talk to me about this if you’d like) but for now I just want to recommend someone who has thought deeply about this topic and has good advice: Jean-luc Doumont.

That's all, folks!

I hope that my reflections about my own Generals Exam experience are helpful to you as you embark on your own journey. You will do great. I am confident of that. Just remember to prioritize your physical and emotional health. Don’t lose sight of your worth—you are more than a graduate student or academic. You are a loved one, a friend. I am rooting for you.