added blog post draft re: area exam

[kalebishop]

No description provided.

[alecive]

Looks great! I'd like to give it a pass myself to make it a tad less personal.

[alecive]

I finally managed to get back to this! First off, great work---I really appreciate you putting it together. It’ll be super helpful for future students.

Before publishing, here are a few things I’d like you to revise:

• Change some of the recommendations to explicit requests, especially regarding the timeline and expectations. For example, I do want the full draft one week before deadline, and I will enforce this more thoroughly in the future. This should be reflected in the tone of the document.
• Move the practice talk to at least one week before the exam.
• Please update the document to reflect that the presentation should be 30 minutes long. I know we did not enforce this before, but this is the new standard agreed on with Brad and Chris and we will enforce it in the future.
• Clean up any TODOs still in the text.
• Add a clear note that the presentation should be roughly split in half: (1) intro/background/bibliography review and (2) a deep dive into a single paper, plus conclusions and your research trajectory. This is an expected component going forward! I know you didn't have it but I expect 99% of students to have it.
• Remove or revise the line that says to “avoid papers older than a few years”---that’s not a blanket rule and depends on context. Generally speaking, I disagree with it.
• Also revise the part saying to “avoid committee members’ papers”---that’s not something we discourage at all! In fact, building on prior work from your advisor or committee is often valuable and something we'd like to see more of.
• Finally, please separate the general advice from your personal experience. The main section should be more about generalizable guidance, and your story should go in a final section with your specific experience.

Let me know if you have any questions!

[alecive]

I updated this file to match my request above. Ready to publish! Thanks @kalebishop for the first draft.