On October 10, I passed candidacy. I'm still trying to figure out how well it went.

On the one hand, I was able to answer almost all of the questions I was asked, my adviser was smiling afterward, and he told me to spend the rest of the day doing something fun (which, I think, indicates that he was satisfied with my performance overall). On the other hand, there was that one part where I started panicking about not being able to remember a hand-waving argument from the theory paper I was citing, and as a result forgot all of physics.

"What's force the gradient of?" I was asked.
"Energy?" I managed to guess, all the while having less-than-informative visions of decomposing MHD equations into orthogonal components and looking at the time variation of the different terms.
"And what kind of energy?"

Now, there are only two types of energy. So even if this weren't something I've known for more than a decade, I'd still have had a 50/50 chance of getting it right.

"Kinetic?" I replied (incorrectly). I think they if they'd have asked me to add two integers right then, I would have gotten it wrong. I eventually muddled through some work on the white board, though, moved on to my next slide, and the rest of the exam went smoothly.

On the bright side, my committee seemed more amused by the incident than anything else. And when I talked to my father about it later, he said that he'd gotten similarly basic questions wrong on his orals back in the day. Afterward, one of his examiners told him that those are the best kind to mess up on, since it's inconceivable that you don't actually know the answer (and, hence, the error is attributed to nerves, rather than ignorance). Nevertheless, I still apologized to my classical mechanics professor when it was all over.

Although any topics from any of the classes I'd taken are fair game in one's candidacy exam, they didn't really ask me anything that wasn't research-related. I'd done a lot of studying, so I almost was like, "Don't you want to ask me any coursework questions?" Almost, but not quite.

They had me go out into the hallway to wait for a few minutes. Then my adviser brought me back in and said, "Congratulations, you passed."

Ever since, I've been trying to catch up on all the things -- both research-related and otherwise -- to which, during the month and a half while I was studying, I said, "I don't have time for this now. I'll do it after candidacy." It's going to take awhile, too. The "things to do after I pass candidacy" list is a long one, and not always that specific; it includes items such as "cook fun recipes," "fix motorcycle," and "EXPERIMENTS!"

But, truly, I'm glad to be working on it.