I completed my preliminary examinations this week. If/when I pass, I will officially become a doctoral candidate.

It’s a somewhat outdated process that seems to exist just because it has always existed. To be fair, my program needs a way to ensure that we are prepared and meet the standards. Some programs use this as a competitive weeding-out process, and it becomes a massive source of stress and anxiety. My program purposefully doesn’t change the questions too much from year to year, so you know what you’re gonna get. I like this not because it makes it easy, but it sets everyone up to succeed if they put in the work. There’s no “gotcha” element. The stress comes from our own inner critics.

I feel cheated in a way. It’s a rite of passage, and would have loved to celebrate more with my cohort and had some community writing sessions. It certainly wasn’t a FUN process because, as a friend says, it’s a “dead document” that will never be revisited. It’s not something I will use in my research nor publish.

It is interesting to step back and see how lucky I am to study what I study: Mentioned in these are, along with the theorists, Talk shows, Eli Roth, General Hospital, gay bars in New York, Raggedy Ann dolls, motion-capture acting, Wyatt Earp as queer figure, castration anxiety, medical theories of enlarged sexual organs, minstrelsy. What I think people misunderstand about my field is that it’s not just sitting around talking about these texts, liking them or not, reciting our knowledge of them. Still, it uses these examples in a larger conversation about cultural theory, critical race theory, American exceptionalism, and critical media studies. Still, I am damn lucky.