In my last post, I mentioned using index cards to write down the past qualifying exam questions. And I did indeed write about 50 of them before saying, you know what, screw this.
I'm now putting them into Access. You can't easily represent formulas in Access, so what I've done is set it up so that I put in TeX code for the problem statements, and then I wrote some code in Access so that it will spit out a TeX file with my problems (in a variety of orders).
I feel pretty awesome about that, and I've now entered about as many problems as I had written on index cards. The process is much faster and the results are way better.
Go me!
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When I failed my qualifying exam I resorted to taking exams from other schools' qualifying exams. It was a bit tricky figuring out which questions were likely to be asked the following fall, and which were likely not on the syllabus, but it provided me with a wider variety of questions to study from. The internets have a large number of such exams floating around. Good luck. Don't let this ruin your summer.
Thanks! I don't think it will ruin my summer - I'm actually having a decent time with it so far. I just need to be sure to work early and often so I can actually get some of this stuff into my brain in an orderly fashion by August.
Oh, and that's a good point about other exams floating around.
Tam, you are so awesome.
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