Comprehensive Exams with Doctoral Candidate, Jayci P - PhD in Management, Oklahoma State University

Hi, I am Jayci Pickering. I am a doctoral candidate in the PhD in management program here at Oklahoma State. So, comps are comprehensive exams. Typically they're taken after your second year of the program, so that's when you're finished or almost finished with all of your coursework. So the faculty assume you have the knowledge you need to complete the comprehensive exams. At OSU, our comprehensive exams are structured so that we have three different sections. For me I did organizational behavior because that's what I'm interested in, that's my stream. If someone specializes in Strategic Management then they would also take a strategic management stream and not the OB stream.

Whatever your stream is, you take a section of that, then you take a methods section and then you take an integrative section. I'm an OB track but my integrative questions had to deal more with strategic management and organizational theory and how micro level processes look at the macro level or vice versa, so that's kind of what those questions will format it around. In terms of methods, that's going to be a broad range of topics on there. Our program is rigorous in terms of our methodological courses. We have you know Lisa Lambert, Nikos Dimotakis, Bryan Edwards, Lindsey Greco. Yeah so they're just looking for us to kind of apply that knowledge to our own ideas and our own research in a novel way.

Then in terms for me what was the organizational behavior section, that involved more questions about theory. For example, talk about the affect literature. How did it start? What does the history of that section of the field look like? How is it developed and then maybe talk about you know what are some questions that remain unanswered, and how might you answer those questions? Or you know, "address that gap" and again that's where you kind of can also come in and demonstrate your methodological knowledge, and say you know, "Here is my idea. This is how I would test my idea. This study would address these limitations on my research question."

So, it's a little more broad but the idea is still the same and they're not looking for you to regurgitate what you've learned or what they've taught you. They're looking for you to apply those things in your own way.

Whatever your mainstream is for that section, it's four questions. You have eight hours for those four questions and I believe we have a five-page page limit. So there are like clear guidelines in terms of what they're expecting from you, in regard to length. Then same with the method section, there are four questions, same amount of time, same page length. Then for the integrative section, you get four questions and you can choose two of them and you still have eight hours to complete those two questions. That's just because it is in an area that typically we're less familiar with, so they just want to know that we can acknowledge that part of the field and kind of draw in theories and apply them to our own research. You passed! Yes!