Here is some information about the preliminary oral exam

1. Once you pass your the exam, you are officially in the PhD program. Don't you want to be there as soon as possible?
2. You can register for thesis credits (you need 24 of them) only after you take the oral exam. Once you finish taking thesis credits (you need at least two semesters to do so), you are ABD (All but dissertation), and it will be cheaper for your adviser to support you as an RA (~$7000/year) as long as you don't need to take classes. You are more likely to be supported as an RA, and you are more likely to be able to convince your adviser to pay you to go to conferences, etc.

Officially, I choose your committee members, but I want you to come up with a reasonable committee in consultation with your adviser (use guidance below), ask them if they can serve on your committee, and bring the list to me. Then I will approve it. If you have a hard time figuring out who can be the “outside physics” member, I can make suggestions.

You need altogether 4 members including your adviser(s). You need one experimentalist and one theorist in your field beside your (main) adviser. The last person should be “outside physics,” meaning that s/he needs to have a graduate faculty appointment outside of physics. Many of the physics faculty members also have another appointment outside of physics. Then they can be this fourth person.

Committee members don't just judge you during the exams. They can be resources to you beside your adviser. If you have some sort of difficulties with your adviser, this aspect of committee members becomes more important. So choose those who could be helpful if case you need it.

In the past, the department required 5 committee members, but since the requirement of the Graduate School is only 4, we decided to save the faculty work load by removing this requirement. However, if you feel you can benefit from an extra member, feel free to have one.

In order to become ABD as soon as possible, it is beneficial to take the oral near the end of a semester than waiting until the beginning of the next semester so that you can register for thesis credits during the “next” semester. The last date that you can take the oral and still are able to register for thesis credits is not clearly defined, but the latest safe day is before the semester starts. This leaves enough time for the Graduate School to process information about your passing the oral (passing with reservation seems OK as long as you satisfy the condition to lift the reservation in a “timely” manner) before the “Last day to add a course without college scholastic committee approval” which is two weeks into the semester. There were some students who got away with taking the oral during the first week of the semester, but this is not recommended. On the other hand, if there is no way to schedule the oral before a semester starts, but is possible during the first week, it is worth doing it, and hope that the paperwork moves fast enough so that you can register for thesis credits that semester.

• Learn enough physics;-)
• File Degree Program form preferably at least one month before the exam.
• Talk to the committee members and find a good time to have the exam.
  • If some member(s) of the committee is not available around the time of the exam, find a suitable substitute(s) and inform the DGS. In turn he can inform the Graduate School about the substitution by Email. Nothing more needs to be done about the substitution.
• Once the Degree Program is approved by the Graduate School, you can (and should) file Doctoral Preliminary Oral Examination Scheduling form to actually schedule your exam. This has to be at least one week before the exam.
• At the same time, talk to Judy so that she can reserve a room for you.
• The Graduate School, then, will send the Preliminary Oral Examination Report form to the chair of the committee, which is your adviser.
• Once the exam is finished, the Preliminary Oral Examination Report must be sent back to the Graduate School within a day (this should be checked - on the Report).

You are expected to write a paper for the oral exam, and give it to the committee members at least one week before the exam. During the exam, you will talk about the paper for up to 20 minutes. A good paper is typically 10 to 20 pages in length (double spaced), and written concisely and to the point.

The paper should deal with a research topic that you may work on for your thesis or part of it to demonstrate that you are “ready” to start research. (If you end up doing something else for your thesis, that's OK.) The paper should therefore demonstrate that you understand why it is meaningful to do such research (why it should be of interest to people or at the least other physicists) and why it is possible (probable or likely?) to find reasonable results. To this end, you should present background information about the proposed research, which may include theoretical basis (if it's experimental research), related research which has been done, and how it is related to the proposed research, how you will do differently from previous work to improve on them, if such research exists, some rough description of your proposed research and what you expect to see, etc. The paper does not have to have any results from your research since it is meant to be an opportunity for you to demonstrate your aptitude to START doing research. However, some professors, particularly those in theories, like you to have done some easy research to see how well you can approach theoretical problems, and may ask you to include some of the work in the oral exam.

Presentation should be no more than 20 minutes so that you will not be rushed when you are asked questions later. In oral presentation, audience usually does not have time to really digest complex concepts, so you should use more visuals than the paper, and discuss issues in a more intuitive way (using graphic?).