Comps day 4

This was the last day of comps - it's up to waiting for the results. The essays were emailed out to the readers immediately at 4pm when I finished.

This day's questions were much more attractive.

First exam was Information Retrieval - a minor area. I had to pick one of three:

- something about a system to present science so that engineers can use it to make technology?

- design and tell how to evaluate an information retrieval system that has both peer-reviewed scientific literature and blogs and wikis of interest to scientists

- exploratory search, what is it, how to support it, etc

I picked the second, but the third was really attractive, too.

The second exam was Research Methods - a minor area. I had to pick one of these two:

- validity in qualitative research what is it and why is it important

- sna vs. bibliometrics, how does one inform the other

I did the validity one because I'm not 100% sure I could really divide sna from bibliometrics as far as the actual methods go. Theory is certainly different but whether the nodes are papers, people, or countries, who cares?

Each of these responses were 1200-1600 words. That's a lot of typing!

If I pass, then I advance to candidacy - or, rather, I can submit my paperwork to advance. Chatting with my advisor today, seems like I probably should put that off, because it starts the next counter. I've got another year until I have to, and when I advance, I've got 4 years to graduate. (I really, really, really hope it doesn't take me that long!)  So now I need to get working on my dissertation proposal (develop a topic first!)