thoughts about qualifying exam prep...

So, that time of year is coming up, the time of qualifying exams. I have resigned myself to the fact that, no matter how much one studies, one is never "ready" for these things...One simply attempts to reach a certain "comfort" level of unreadiness. For medieval history here at my university, there is no set reading list--understandably, since it's hard to formulate any kind of comprehensive plan for a massive geographical space over the period of a millennium (one expects to teach the general "High Middle Ages," "Late Middle Ages" courses, naturally, but that's mostly a matter of finding a half-decent non-textbook textbook, and tailoring the course to your own interests, unless you are creative...whatever). On the other hand, how do you process all this information, especially if, as I am doing, you are developing a minor field in modern history as well? [My major field is medieval European history, minor field 1 is medieval monasticism/art history, minor field 2 is modern Germany--which last is really a rather major minor field, and one in which I have various research interests.]

To deal with this situation, I have been attempting to put into practice a bowdlerized version of Duke's system for preparing their history grad students, which is based on preparing a portfolio of their fields, teaching and intellectual philosophies, etc., and which is supposed to serve not only as a exam prep but as job market prep as well. Very useful, it seemed to me, if rather intense, having learned about it, if I'm remembering correctly, as a prospective from another prospective while visiting an institution which was not Duke. The full description, for the curious, is here:
http://www-history.aas.duke.edu/graduate/handbookpreliminaryexams.php

My own approach has been to design a series of syllabus templates, at several levels (introductory, upper level seminar, and graduate seminar), which should cover major teaching topics while at the same time solidifying my reading and grasp of the field in general. So far, not bad, I think. We'll see how it goes in the "dry run" in about a week.

In the mean time, there are certain to be more posts of a more-or-less esoteric nature on various archaic points of history and historiography, some of which will probably be driven by frustration and a lack of sleep. They say it only gets worse from here...