Nate and his Qualifying Exam...

Well, I only had a few days to study for it after I fininshed my finals for spring quarter... bad time for a qualifying exam.... Well, I had my qualifying exam this morning at 9am (oral exam that my department gives at the end of the first year, in which they decide if they want to keep us). All of the professors finally showed up at ~9:10am. They were supposed to ask me about my research (and I was hoping to kill some extra time on that), but they decided to jump right into the questions. The first professor asked me a few questions about Fick's laws and had me solve a few diffusion questions. Fortunately they were all directly from the class I took from him last winter. Then the second professor (who taught a cell biology, which everyone was supposed to take, but I got them to waive despite the fact that I've never taken the class before...) started to fire away... I stumbled a little at first when she was asking about the methods used to discover aquaporins. The third professor tried asking questions about solution thermodynamics, a topic they don't even offer to the students, but that I had several years ago, but didn't understand... all he had to say every time I spoke was, "don't go any further, because you're just digging yourself deeper." He did finally ask a question at the end about time scales of a dyanmic mass-spring system. The cell bio professor finished up by asking a few last questions about the problems with implanting embryonic stem cells. Fortunately, I'd read about the associated issues in the past few days when I read ~2.5 chapters of the textbook. When they asked me to step out while they discussed my standing, I thought they might ask me to study thermodynamics again and then retake the exam or make me TA a class at best, when I walked in, they shook my hand and congratulated me on passing, then told me to get a thermo book and read it... I'm really glad they passed me, since my adviser said they were failing a surprisingly large number of students this year!
I came home tonight and found that I guess someone else knew I passed... I found a 6 pack of beer on my doorstep! (With a thank you note from a neighbor I've only met the other day when I found their keys in their mailbox, so I returned them) I'm sure glad that I was babysitting for a friend when they dropped the the 6 pack off... That would've been awkward saying "thanks, but I don't drink." Well, to the trash bin they go!