Statsman - just wanted to send some words of sympathy your way. I failed one of my comps on the first go. I was a basket case. It’s rough going. Over the course of the following months I cried in three different profs’ offices. I also found it difficult to deal with my friends’/family’s expectation about my performance. So you have my sympathies. Hang in there.
You’ve made me laugh, sir. Godspeed in all your endeavors.
I wanted to reopen the thread to wish you luck, but I didn’t. I was going to be all mean about it, but some asshole beat me to it.
So are people going to stop being assholes in this thread, or what? After the reopening, it seemed like a change of pace, but that’s starting to seem murky. Poor guy’s having a hard time and wanted to vent about it on a message board, and people act like he drowned his favorite uncle. And I thought I was mean.
No kidding. This isn’t exactly him going to each and every family member and telling them to go fuck themselves for their overly-optimistic encouragement.
People usually don’t know what to say when people are stressed out.
If you’re constantly talking about your worries and anxieties, you’re almost begging for people to say “It’ll be alright”.
My brother has been unemployed for more than a year now, and when I talked to him the other day, all I could think to say was, “It will get better. I know it will.” I’m sure he was rolling his eyes thinking the same thing you expressed in your OP.
The truth is IT will get better for him…someday. And for you, it WILL be alright, even if you do flunk your comps. I’ve known people who’ve flunked and were allowed to take a stab at them again and then pass. I’ve also known people who have dropped out of grad school and have found success without an advanced degree. Sometimes the road we want isn’t the one we’re supposed to take, but you’ll find yourself on another path and you’re home.
Comps suck, so I’m full of sympathy. The key is keeping your head screwed on and not letting yourself fall to pieces so that you can study with clarity.
Normally I agree with just about everything you say. This time I’d say that if the OP just wanted to vent and talk about his hard time without anyone answering him in kind he should get a blog or journal. I’m sure he’s stressed out as we all can be, but he’s being very bit the sarcastic asshole as the people who are poking him.
:: awaits his O-so-clever questioning of my psychological-assessment-abilities ::
We usually do it in the same thread around here. Its the way board tradition works.
I’m glad you see you recognize you were unreasonable. When my sister had breast cancer she was subjected to thousands of “it will be OK.” Which was way better than the thousands of “God has a plan” or “God never sends us anything we can’t handle” - cancer at 38 with a six month old infant at home…yeah, wasn’t helpful. Even though, eventually, it was OK.
As someone who suffers depression and anxiety myself, my advice to you is to consciously try and change your thinking. Assume that everyone is trying to be kind and helpful - even if their words are awkward. When my kids make me breakfast in bed on Mother’s Day and I come down to a kitchen that looks like the Franco-Prussian war was fought in it, I remember they are trying to be kind and helpful. When someone tells me a God who I don’t believe in is sending me these trials out of love, I translate to “That which does not kill us makes us stronger” and accept the intent, if not the words used.
Another behavioral clue - as pointed out upthread, if you complain you are pretty much asking for people to say “it’ll be ok.” That’s what people do. People do it when someone loses a child and all hope is drained from their world and the sun will never shine again, they are certainly going to do it over your exams. If you don’t want that, then vent directions in which people are going to be able to vent back, or vent in a journal. If its my birthday and I get offended when people say “Happy Birthday” or “How old are you?” I need to keep the fact that its my birthday to myself…because the socially agreed on response to “its my birthday” is “Happy Birthday.” The socially agreed on response to “I’m worried about X” is “it will be alright.”
If your meds aren’t working on the anxiety and depression, get different meds. Paxil is really old school nowadays.
Oh man, it’s worse than I thought. Now you’re deflecting. 
statsman1982, you have my support and sympathy. I recently finished my actuarial exams and I cannot tell you how frustrating it was to have people constantly tell me, “Oh, I’m sure you passed.” (Even after five failures out of 14 attempts.) They cannot realize how dismissive and insulting that comment is. It hurts like hell after you’ve worked your ass of for four months and know that there is still a good chance that you’ve failed.
I’m sure giving an oral defense of a doctoral thesis is ball-grindingly difficult, and it will probably be an insane amount of work. I hope the rest of the process will go well for you. If it does, it will be a tribute to your perseverance and hard work and not something that “of course you passed”.
Sweet.
I’d say he got a bit defensive, sure, but likely because he didn’t expect everyone to be so mean to him about this. Clearly the statements in the OP are not the right approach, but to me it just seems like he expressed himself that way because he’s extremely pissed and frustrated, and doesn’t know what to say or how to feel. Instead of everyone saying, “It’s reasonable to be frustrated and angry, but…”, people poked him with sticks. Seemed kinda needlessly mean-spirited to me, is all.
MeanOldLady That’s the Pit. He came here to vent about people wishing him well, which is kind of a dick move to begin with. So he didn’t want people to say nice things, so I am saying mean things. Ultimately he’s trying to hold others responsible for his own inability to manage his internal emotional state. He knows how well he studied, he knows how good he is at his own discipline, he should be able to dismiss well-meaning platitudes just like everyone else does. I took a test not so long ago that I didn’t study enough for and I was worried about it, and I did poorly, but it was pass-fail and I passed, but everyone thought I would ace it from my classmates to my family. But I didn’t study enough, and that was MY problem, or more specifically I studied just barely enough. It can be annoying when people are cheerleading for you, but the bottom line is, it’s really all about what you do to pass those tests. It doesn’t matter whether or not Mommy says he’s her little genius and he’s going to pass, and it doesn’t matter whether some asshole like me gets on and tells him he’s going to do poorly in response to his whining.
Really, the only person responsible for anything in his predicament is himself. If he is going to post an OP like the one he did, he needs to recognize that all the sarcastic assholes who live for blowing off steam by telling people off are going to pipe up. If all he wanted was commiseration he should’ve posted in MPSIMS or IMHO.
I think folks would have cut him much more slack if not for 2 things.
The “you guys barely got you lowely college degree and you dont/cant understand my stuff” thing. Hard to do that without coming off as an ass.
And if he could put at least one thing in there about how while the platitudes were extremely frustrating, he recognized that they were well intentioned.
Oh, thirdly, he did choose this lifestyle…so meh.
I do hope he does destress and take care of meds and medical issues though.
And if you think oral exams are bad, you should try the anal ones 
No, he didn’t. He came here to vent about people telling him “you have nothing to worry about” and “of course you passed”.
There are exams in high school and undergraduate college, in which a person doing a reasonable amount of work and bringing raw IQ points to the table is virtually guaranteed to pass.
Then there are advanced professional tests–the CPA, the CFA, actuarial exams, bar exams, thesis defenses. These are a different breed of cat. Everybody in the room has a high IQ and worked hard to prepare. Most have high GPA’s from prestigious universities. Many will fail anyway.
To say “of course you passed” or “you have nothing to worry about” implies that one of the latter exams is just like one of the former, which is dismissive of the far harder work involved to pass one of the latter.
Memo to the entire world: Do you have a friend taking advanced professional certification exams? Here are some good things to say:
“I hope you passed.”
“I’m pulling for you.”
“It sounds like a lot of work.”
“If you passed, I’ll throw you a party.” (Bonus points if you actually deliver.)
And here are some crappy, dismissive, insulting things to say:
“You’re so smart, of course you passed.”
“I’m sure you have nothing to worry about.”
“I wish I was smart like you.”
Sorry your quals didn’t go the way you’d planned. I’ll be taking mine (molecular biology, we have to take both orals and writtens) in a couple of months, and I hope I have the expertise to pull it off.
On the other hand, they didn’t outright fail you. When do you take the make-ups?
Hear hear.
As someone who had to take a lot of really tough exams - including thesis defense and two rounds of specialty certification - I agree 100%. There are some exams that are really, really tough. So hard than many very smart, prepared people fail them. It isn’t false modesty to be afraid of not passing. You want the person who is trying to support you to acknowledge that this is really, really hard. And that any rational person knows that passing isn’t a slam dunk and that the only reasonable response to taking one is to realize that one might not pass on the first attempt.
I think in this country we’ve got the “you can do anything if you just try hard enough” message beaten into our heads so much that folks start to believe it.
Cheer up, kid. Bomb the orals and you can skip the rectal.
Bah
Glass half empty… dont those stupid fuckers realize I might fail this thing ?
Glass half full… boy, we know you are SO smart and hard working you’ll pass EVEN this hard assed test.
When people LOOK for bad shit in well intended actions…hell, not even actions, frackin WORDS for petes sake…well, I personally have little sympathy.
statsman1982, it sucks to be in your position. You’re a smart guy, you’ve worked hard, and yet, somehow, for perhaps the first time, you have not leaped gracefully over the bar, but instead have stumbled. You can’t let it get you down - this is how everybody goes through life, even the most gifted.
Remain confident and be persistent - keep working, because this is when you show what you’re really made of. Let the pain and disillusionment of this experience leaven your personality, and grow into compassion for people who aren’t as gifted as you, and who experience this kind of disappointment all the time. If you can do that, you’ll have gotten some value out of the experience, and your future students, colleagues and friends will benefit.
Turn on your PM function and we can tell you some real stories.
Comps was one of the worst experiences of my life. I was dealing with some personal issues at the same time, and the combination was just… ugh.
I feel for you. I, like everyone else in the same situation who has posted in this thread, hate hate hate the “oh, you’ll do fine!” response. It’s dismissive. Dismissive of my work, of my anxiety, of my emotions. If I want to have an honest discussion about my fears and stresses, that is not what I want to hear.
So I will instead say: good luck, statsman. It sucks, but you will emerge alive.