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The following information is specific to your chosen field:
- Fission students: *
- Prof. Smith did a mock oral exam practise for 22.211 in Spring 2012, and it is definitely a good practise for at least the neutronics folks!
- 22.39 typically prepares you for the oral exam. For Fall 2013, it looks like the 2nd half of 22.251 will be going over different reactor types which could be very helpful for oral exam preparation!
- # NST students: Mareena Robinson generously shared her experience on how to prepare NST's oral exams:
- As an NST student, your oral exam is two parts: (i) an article you pick to be grilled on and (ii) questions the committee prepares to grill you on. For the first section, you are allowed to prepare 3-5 slides to help you through your article presentation. I personally recommend using those slides as reminders of things you know you're not going to remember in your head: complex equations, specific times or durations of reactions or decays, complex graphs that you can't seem to remember in high stress situations, etc. Since NST is so broad, from nuclear security to quantum computing, every one on your committee will probably not be an expect on the article you choose. Make sure you know the big picture stuff as well; the questions that a novice in your field would ask. Those tend to be the unexpected easy questions that you don't prepare for.
- Also, if you are fortunate enough to have an idea of who will be on your oral committee, brush up as best you can on their area of expertise. From my oral experience, the questions they gave me for the second portion of my exam really reflected their interests. So if you know you're going to have Scott Kemp on your oral, know a thing or two about enrichment technologies, just as an example. If you're more on the detection side, know the basics (basics being everything the Knoll Chp 1-14). It may not show up on your oral but it would suck if it did and you didn't know it. All in all, just don't loose your nerve and say something blatantly wrong. If you don't know something and can't seem to reason through it, just say you don't know.
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