Graduate Board Oral Exam
The Graduate Board Oral Examination is the next-to-last step for a physics grad
student at Hopkins (see Hopkins
Exam Schedule for all the gory
details). It should be taken in the 3rd (or 4th... or 5th...) year, and after passing it a master's degree is awarded. The exam requires a 3-5 page paper which must be submitted to the 5 committee members and 2 alternates approximately 1-2 weeks before the exam. The subject of this paper is the student's current research, which may or may not be leading directly to a thesis. Then the exam starts off with the student giving a 20 min. presentation on that research.
Below I have posted both my GBO paper and the accompanying presentation, in pdf and ps formats (all compiled with LaTeX2e). These are only an example of how you could choose to format the paper/presentation, not a definitive outline for doing so. Also, the last 3 slides in my presentation were backups in case someone asked for more info on one of those topics. I didn't actually have to use them.
GBO Paper
Title: "Observation of orbitally excited (L=1) B mesons in B -> J/psi K decays"
GBOpaper.pdf
GBOpaper.ps
GBO Presentation
GBOslides.pdf
GBOslides.ps
Along with the presentation...
Usually your committee interupts to ask questions during your presentation. These questions can either be relevant to what you're talking about, or just sort of generally related to something similar. During my presentation, I was asked questions such as:
- What would it mean if the CKM matrix were not unitary?
- Would that tell us anything about string theories? Or other theories of physics beyond the standard model?
- What would it mean if leptons could mix the way quarks do?
- How does neutrino mass enter into the picture?
- Derive a formula to measure a particle's lifetime from the ct measurements the detector makes.
- What tracks would we see if B's decayed strongly instead of weakly?
- What are the axes on the theory plot?
- How would a higher luminosity beam affect your background?
- Why does this mass plot look better than the one in your 2nd yr seminar presentation? (includes more data)
- Why does this mass plot look better than the one in your paper? (used wider bins)
- Draw a sample mass plot, indicating the contributions from various backgrounds and signals.
- What is 'combinatorial' background and how do you see it in your
analysis?
After the presentation, my committee members each took several minutes to ask various questions, NOT directly related to the presentation, such as:
- Who came up with the idea of a cosmological constant and why? Why did he call that his biggest blunder? And why do we now believe in the idea of a cosmological constant?
- What happens to the strength of an electric charge as you get closer
to it?
- What mechanisms might account for dark energy?
- How large an excess must you have in order to declare a mass result like this to be definitive?
- What distribution would you use to model a small number of expected events?
- If you had the distribution for a sum of two independent variables, how would you then find the individual distributions of the two variables?
In total, my GBO lasted about an hour and a half (the presentation alone took over an hour to get through).
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