Email dated 9/8/2005 from Dr. Shirer:

The next PhD Candidacy Exam will next be given in December, 2005 after finals week or in early January, 2006 before spring classes start. Students who intend on taking this exam should sign up by Monday, November 14, 2005 by sending an e-mail to me at hns@psu.edu. In this e-mail, please include the following information:

Name, Adviser, E-mail address, Office address

I will hold a meeting in late November, 2005 with those students taking the next exam to talk about logistics and to answer any questions the students might have.

Here is the departmental statement about the PhD Candidacy Exam:

Students are expected to have mastered the material presented in the required MS core courses (Meteo 501, 520, 521, 533, 535) and the fundamental concepts from undergraduate-level mathematics and physics. On the candidacy exam, students will answer questions using tools needed to perform research, questions testing their fundamental knowledge of atmospheric structure and physics, and questions applying these tools and knowledge to integrative topics such as weather and climate.

The exam will be given on two consecutive days, with a four-hour examination period each day. Generally, five questions will be given on each day, three of which must be answered. Normally, the first day focuses on dynamic meteorology and the second day on physical meteorology. Questions are not course-specific and may well require students to combine knowledge from more than one subdiscipline of atmospheric science. The choice of questions in each category on each day will be at the discretion of the GAP subcommittee that composes the exam; the subcommittee will ensure that the exam broadly covers the areas summarized above and that the expected knowledge base of the examinees is that attainable after the first two semesters of graduate study.