At UCSF, the widely-agreed-upon worst experience of a graduate student's academic life is the oral qualifying exam. The most succinct explanation for how orals work is that you stand in a room with 4 professors, who are experts in your field, and you have to defend a research proposal from three hours of grilling from them. Here are several reasons why this is an awful experience, in no particular order:
1. Evaluating a research proposal is subjective. The research hasn't been done yet. Deciding whether or not a proposal is likely to work is (in my view, at least) a much harder task than evaluating a finished project. So you might think your proposal is airtight, but in the end, the outcome of your exam rests on getting your committee to agree with you.
2. The committee isn't required to limit the scope of questions to your proposed research. The exam is very open-ended: the committee can ask you whatever they feel like asking you. This makes it impossible to ever feel like you've studied enough for the exam.
3. You have to get 4 busy professors to sit down in a room with you for 3 hours. Not surprisingly, this is a scheduling nightmare.
4. You're expected to have "preliminary results." This extremely unfortunate feature of the exam was (I think) set up with the best of intentions: it's supposed to be a demonstration that what you're proposing to do is basically plausible, and provide a framework for discussion. However, in most cases, it's not at all clear what constitutes "plausibility," and how detailed these results need to be for the proposal to pass the laugh test. This leads to proposals that are (1) unnecessarily tentative and incremental, and (2) impossible to defend until they're just short of completion.
5. You take the exam alone. This sounds obvious, but if you're in an interdisciplinary program, often there's a big emphasis on collaboration -- as a not-so-hypothetical example, if your project requires some expertise in graph theory, bioinformatics, statistical physics, structural biology, and genetics, then as a practical matter, typically the way you'd handle that is to collaborate with people with deep expertise in those areas. Interdisciplinary programs are set up to encourage this collaboration, it being recognized as the most efficient way to handle projects of this nature. However, as you write your orals proposal, the horrifying fact begins to dawn on you that you can't take your collaborators into the exam with you. You're going to be interrogated on all of those subjects, and be expected to answer detailed questions and objections.
6. The point of the exam is, as I understand it, to see at what point your knowledge fails. That is, have you thought deeply and critically enough about your project, and the underlying subjects, to be able to competently carry out the proposed research? (Another, more cynical, way to say this is, Will you be an embarrassment to our school's good name if we give you a PhD with "UCSF" stamped on it?) The reason this is extremely stressful is that you know going into the exam the committee is going to keep pushing you until you break -- and then decide if what it took to break you was high-level enough that you deserve to continue on towards your doctorate.
Anyway, preparing for and taking orals is a pretty harrowing experience. I'm happy to report that I passed my orals this past week. As one of my labmates observed to me afterwards: "It's nice to know that you'll only have to do this once, ever, in your entire life." That, in fact, is one of the things that helped me keep my nose to the grindstone -- the knowledge that, if I failed the exam, I'd have to re-take it in a few months (and get kicked out of school if I failed again). The thought of going through this again was more than sufficient motivation to keep me hitting the books, night after night.
Now I'm done, and I'm taking a week or two off, during which I have to decide what to do next. It's the first time in a long time that I have something like an open, unknown road in front of me, and I intend to make the most of it.
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