I'm Back and I Passed! A Harrowing Tale of a Fragile Soul

Bear with me a very personal story.

After a long hiatus, the Relay is back in action! In July, I subjected myself to the horrors of the comprehensive exam for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. What this entails is that your committe of, depending on the school, three to five members (in my case, here, five) submit to you questions that you have to answer in both written and oral form. The details vary from school to school. Here at North Carolina, the process is that I receive two written questions, of which I'm expected to write a paper of around 20-25 pages, in one week. The questions are consecutive. Then, there is a third question that is answered isolated in a room, live and without notes, in a four-hour in-house session. Then, you have to face your committee for an hour-and-a-half of cross-examination over anything they want to talk about concerning you answers and your reading list that they approved. Daunting enough.

But, of course, with me, things are never as simple as they seem. When I was at the University of Texas ten years ago, I completed my coursework and progressed to my comps. There, the rules were a little more lax in that they didn't have the time restriction, but they also usually asked much more detailed yet broad questions. I finished my first question. Then I kind of had a meltdown and never finished another. Thus, I left the program. And when I came to UNC five years ago to try again, I had to repeat the entire curriculum. My advisor tells me I may be the most educated grad student in history, having completed coursework in not one but two PhD programs after completing a separate, M.A. terminal program.

The key thing is that I have, for about twenty years, suffered from a form of mental illness. I have a condition of overwhelming anxiety and anxiety-produced depression. This led me to becoming a rather functional (though now recovering) alcoholic, but one nonetheless that everntually caught up with me. This is a subject I hope to write about someday as I think it will be good to let out. But not today. The key is that together with these conditions, and the experience in Texas that they conspired to help create, built a psychological hurdle of the comprehensive exams that made me absolutely bonkers. I first tried to do my comps here at UNC in March, and I lost it. I didn't finish the question in the time required and I had a relapse of the worst order. That spurred me to get back into counseling. And finally, finally, I found a right combination of therapist and medicine that has really, really helped.

In June, I started my comps again as they let me reschedule. All the anxiety was there, but I worked through it. The end result of my take homes were not papers I was very proud of--I would say they were mediocre work at best. But I got them done. Then the in-house question came around. And I choked.

I wasn't feeling well that day. I had a summer cold. I also wasn't allowed to bring into the room, on the honor system that I wasn't going to break, any other materials than my laptop (and not use any materials on my laptop but my word processor (must be hard to enforce from the days when they would just stick you in a closet with a typewriter)). I found out three things: 1) I don't think well when I have a head cold; 2) I think in longhand--I need a pad of paper to jot down ideas (I'm still ambivalent about creating papers on the computer); 3) as a result I had the worst case of thinker's and writer's block I ever had. I punted that question. I mean it was BAD. I told my advisor that, and she thought I was just being pessimistic me. Until she read it. And we got together to go over strategy for the oral defense.

"You were right. You booted this," she said. And then went along to how I did such a boot and how we might save my sorry ass through damage control. I misread the question. She suggests I write an outline of what I should have said. So I do this.

At this point, I'm a freaking nervous wreck. I've been facing this one stupid hurdle for over ten years. It propels me beyond all rationality. Because of scheduling conflicts, I have to wait almost a month and a half for my oral exams. I am going crazy. The orals come and I guess I do okay, but not great. First thing I say, in true debate tradition, is a pre-emptatory strike on how I punted the third question. But the committee doesn't buy our outline idea. They want me to rewrite it. Otherwise, they say I pass. They give suggestions as to what they want. Easy, right?

Not with Collins.

I write over the weekend and try to come up with a smart yet concise answer to the original question (they didn't make me do it in-house again). But I'm kind of clueless about certain expectations. So there is a certain panic about how to answer the seemingly most insignificant answer of the three questions. But I crafted one. And was placing the finishing touches on it when I had to go teach on Monday. I emailed my committee and told them that I was almost done and would get them my answer later that day.

So I taught. And came home.

And then, shit happened. For alcoholics like me, who just quit and especially those of us who had seizures (I had a seizure last year--post to come), there is a certain condition called PAW--Post-Acute Withdrawal. Basically, its when your brain has to rewire itself from too many years of drinking too much. There are times when you are in the middle of a sentence and you will just blank out. For me, there have been times when for a brief moment I have a moment of dyslexia, a number switched or a letter that looks like another. It's been over a year since my seizure and these moments happen rather rarely nowadays. But they say and told us that these moments may take up to three years sometimes to totally clear out. Monday, as I was about to finish my comp rewrite, this must have happened to me.

What I think happened is that I've been writing so much lately from the comps and the first week of class, is that my desktop is really cluttered with files. I was trying to cull them, particularly like my comps files that were redundant. I wrote a rewrite of my third question to make it an outline. My advisor revised it and sent it back. Now I had two files in different folders named "collinsquals3b.com" My newest rewrite I had called "collinsquals3d.com." I wanted to clean my laptop and get rid of redundant files. I think what happened was I saw "3d" and thought "3b" and sent it to the trash and without thinking, emptied the trash.

I quickly found out I had deleted my almost-completed rewrite. And this was the deadline.

For a guy who sufferes from anxiety, this was not good.

But I dealt with it (had a good therapist that taught me a lot in the weeks prior). And I bunkered down and rewrote the damn thing. I don't know how similar it was to the original--I'm not a good outliner. The paper I finished with was definitely not the same as the original, but it was close enough. And it was a little late.

So, I was sweating. But late today, my advisor told me that my rewrite was accepted! I have finally, after ten years, passed my comps! Now it's the dissertation and I actually think that since I've been able to pass this great psychological hurdle, this might be a fun experience.

Please let it be short. I need to get out of debt and start saving. Bush's America ain't mine.