I should have written about this a few months ago when this was still fresh and relevant, but here it goes. I gave the Ph.D. qualification exam for the Thermal Science and Engineering Major in the Mechanical and Aerospace Department at UCLA. If you know me personally, you’d know I recently graduated from UCLA with an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering. So why give a Ph.D. qualification exam? Well, because I could.

At UCLA, I was allowed to give the Ph.D. qualification exam by changing my track to Ph.D. Ever since I started graduate school, I kept hearing everyone in the Ph.D. track preparing for the qualification examination. So when I had a chance to give the exam, I asked myself and my advisors about giving the exam. When I started at UCLA, I had no intentions to give the exam because I was gaining nothing out of it. After some discussions with my advisors, especially Professor Lavine, Professor Wirz, Professor Eldredge, and Professor Ayyaswamy, I decided to give the exam as a challenge to myself and to prove it to anyone who asks if I have mastered the field of Thermal Science and Engineering.

Now, just to put everything on a time frame. I made this decision in April. The exam was at the end of June. Everyone else was preparing for the exam since September/October. And here I was, thinking of doing the unthinkable. Prepare for one of the toughest exams an aspiring doctorate student ever gives and clearing it. Some might say I was out of mind.

None the less, it was time to power through. The final quarter at UCLA was rough to say the least. I had some really heavy classes, and studying for them while preparing for the qualification exam was almost impossible. I distinctly remember I had started actually preparing for the exam at the end of May because I did not have any time before that. The next three weeks were some of the most intense weeks of my life. I graduated from UCLA with my Masters on June 14th, 2019. The first day of the qualification exam was on 20th June, 2019. Six days to revise everything that I have learned about Thermal Science and Engineering from undergraduate and graduate studies.

I will leave out the part of time during the examination. I will just say that the 4 hour, 2-day exam was probably the most grueling exam I have ever given.

After 7 weeks, the results were out. And guess what… I cleared the exam! I managed to pass the Ph.D. qualification examination, one of the toughest examinations for doctorate candidates.