PhD Comprehensive Exam
See the Graduate Student Handbook for details on the comprehensive exam. Below are three report examples.
Examples
See the examples below for previous comprehensive exam reports.
"Atmospheric Waves Experiment" Comprehensive Exam Example
"VECSELSs: A flexible laser platform with a high degree of customization" Comprehensive Exam Example
"Surface Metrology for Thermoformed Radio Antenna Panels" Comprehensive Exam Example
PhD Qualifying Exam
The 2024 PhD Qualifying exam will be held on August 19 and 20, 2024. The exam will begin promptly at 9:30am, with check-in for the exam beginning at 9:00am. On each day, the exam will run from 9:30am-noon. The exam is held in-person at Optical Sciences; remote examination is not permitted. Logistics for the exam, including room location and instructions, are sent to students at the beginning of the summer prior to the exam.
About the exam: The main written exam used to demonstrate a PhD student's understanding of core course material has been called the Prelim Exam, the Comprehensive Exam, and the Qualifying Exam. The topics and courses tested have also changed over the last 20 years. However, the format of the questions for these written exams has remained the same: each question covers a topic from one of the core courses, and each question is intended to be completed within approximately 30 minutes.
The PhD Qualifying Exam is given over two mornings in August, on the Monday and Tuesday of the week before fall classes start. On each day, 4 questions are given, so the written Qualifying Exam has a total of 8 questions. On each day of testing, an equation sheet (see below) is given in addition to the questions, and the 4 questions for that day can be answered in any order and the total time can be distributed among the different questions as desired.
The questions cover the material discussed in the PhD core courses OPTI 501, OPTI 502, OPTI 505R, and OPTI 511R. Some students will have taken the advanced Optical Physics core course sequence of OPTI 570 and OPTI 544, instead of the introductory Optical Physics course OPTI 511R; these students will be suitably prepared for the OPTI 511R questions, but all students should nevertheless look through the PDF below that lists common topics between the optical physics courses that are most likely to appear on the exam. For the 2024 exam, the topics of laser resonators and laser physics will not appear on the exam. However, these topics will be tested again beginning with the 2025 exam, so all PhD students taking the exam that year must have taken either OPTI 511R or OPTI 541A prior to August 2025.
Exam Resources
- Equation Sheet (note that the PhD Qualifying Exam now has 4 questions each day, rather than 5 as stated on the PDF)
- Optical Physics questions common topics (OPTI 511 and OPTI 570/544)