SAASS Comps Prep Wiki
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Samurai

Comps are like interrogations. First, you may or may not escape with your academic life. Second, they can be unpleasant depending on interrogator’s techniques. Third, there is no need to fear interrogations but fear is common. And like interrogations, succeed or fail, you want to “return with honor”. Is there a code of conduct to support returning with honor? I think so, but first let's picture the room.


No matter how pleasant individual professors may or may not be, they are there to interrogate the results of their instruction. Once the door closes, the professors are not your friends--it is clinical--and you must stand alone. That is the cold reality. You are facing three intellectual snipers who are trying to take you down. They want to know if you are ready for the intellectual battlefield. If your comp experience somehow works out to be more pleasant, then just count yourself fortunate.


The stakes of extreme failure in comps has obvious results that vary in intensity from one university to another. However, normal failure in comps results in various degrees of personal humiliation (for reference, I once had a peer who killed himself after failing comps… it can be very embarrassing). If you are good with humiliation, then just press to the merge as your engine melts unaware. If not, then let's reason together about successful comp traits.


Success in comps, like many endeavors, is favored by specific traits. This can be claimed about several performance skills. Consider inventing. Jakab's treatment of the Wright Brothers asserted they had specific traits and talents that made them good inventors. This list of traits included bicycle cross-over understanding into aeronautical SA (7, 9-10, 50-52, 75, 81, 95-96); fascination with bird flight (52) like Cayley (32) and Lilienthal (33); collaborative personality traits (10-12), broad education (2-3); having an engineering approach (1-2, 80-81, 124-125), emphasizing continuity of design (5), mechanical aptitude (6-7); and spiritual fortitude (164).


Or consider piloting. Success is pre-deposed to certain elements of judgment. A 50,000+/hour pilot once told me plainly, “flying is judgment”. An author named Darren Smith captured the following traits that predispose pilots to success (from “Getting the Most from Your Flight Training”). These include knowing when to take command, meaningful self-evaluation, respect, recurrent training, humility, determination, planning and precision. I suggest that comps too have specific traits that favor success.


I submit the following traits are not personality dependent. For example, you can be a quiet introvert and still demonstrate these traits. Further, just as you may be gifted (or not) in some areas it doesn’t mean you can’t become talented in the others. For example, I’m not a gifted leader but I can become a talented one.


I make no special claims about these comp traits. Please just take it as one person’s view on the common task before us.


SOLID GROUND. When taking a position, our ambition should be to start on solid ground. Digress into irrelevancies all you wish but at least start on solid ground. If you wish to maintain there are good forms of Groupthink, first establish what Janis really said about Groupthink. If you wish to assert that complexity theory started with Gilgamesh not Gleick or Waldrop, then be clear about why. Solid ground is sticking to the facts and starting with what is before you assert what ought to be.


WELL-SOURCED. We were hammered on this in graduate school. It made me better. In the best seminars, we didn’t even have a seat at the table if we weren’t well-sourced. People would stop listening to you. Professors stop calling on you. Everyone stops looking forward to what you have to say. Everyone has opinions, right? But not everyone is well-sourced, right? The trait of being well-sourced is not as hard as you may think. Just ask yourself, from where am I getting my premise? People usually look forward to shooting someone who makes ‘stuff’ up (MSU) and conversely, feel badly shooting someone who is intellectually honest and well-sourced.


TIGHT IF/THENs. It doesn’t hurt to start including actual “if-then” phrases in your argumentation. ‘If-thens’ almost force you to be logical even if you are not. It also allows you to observe the ‘distance’ between your premises and your conclusions. Really cogent arguments have believable ‘ifs’ and tight ‘thens’. Our goal is always to be more cogent no matter how visionary we are. But if someone can drive a Mack truck through your if-thens, they probably will… with joy.


STAY ON POINT. When we don’t know an answer to a question we tend to answer what we can. This is not inherently wrong unless it takes us off point. I may be the only one, but, have you ever answered an essay question and the feedback was, ‘great answer but that wasn’t the question’? You can do this in comps too. And in an oral exam you don’t have the luxury of sitting in your kennel and pondering your answer until the cows come home.


CONVERSANT CONCEPTS. Isolate a set of key concepts from each book that you are able to explain. This is not always the same as the thesis. To identify ‘conversant concepts’ ask, when the average scholar thinks about this book, what concepts come to mind? What should the average scholar walk away with? This allows you to “be conversant” in a set of key concepts that will apply to most comp questions. For Waltz, we should be conversant in the security dilemma. For Doyle, we should be conversant about the difference in liberalism and realism (not simply the difference between CNN and Fox). For Thucydides, we should be conversant with the three national motives of fear, honor and interest, etc. This simplifies our prep quest… particularly for books in which we are weak (it is safe to say we probably all vary in strength and weakness on the various book—we’ve read a modest set of books here).


BE DEFINITIONAL. Define ambiguous terms. This simply takes a few rounds away from the snipers. Of course, you can successfully answer a comp question without being definitional. However, refusing to be definitional is like saying “I don’t believe in cover and concealment” when walking across an open field outside Fallujah. You are just asking to be shot.


BE INSTRUCTIONAL. It doesn’t hurt to answer questions in an instructional mode. You do have a grip on the material (albeit of varying degrees). After reading a book we rehashed them for two straight hours. We’ve rehashed some of them in TITNF. You have reviewed notes to get ready for comps. As a result, you have some insights. You are therefore, somewhat prepared to actually teach the material. Now, while the committee will collectively know more than you (and typically favor questions in their own wheel-house) it doesn’t mean you can’t give them a genuine insight. That is not a bad goal during comps. Be enlightening (without being preachy). Be instructional.


BE COLLABORATIVE. There can be a tendency for comps to become combative. However, you are in the driver seat to control the climate. Remember that “a gentle word can break a bone” (Proverbs 25:15) and “a gentle answer turns away wrath” (Proverbs 15:1). This doesn’t mean have no passion. But you want to lead the climate of the room Ghandi or King style. Don’t hit back, just be right and stay right. Thus, be collaborative not combative. It sounds obvious but when your bad ideas are being exposed for what they are really worth, you can easily drift into combativeness if you are not mentally prepared.


REHERSALS ARE PROFESSIONAL. At Ranger school we were taught that one-third of our mission planning day should be devoted to actual rehearsals. The field is the ultimate reality. Get out to the proving grounds. The more realistic the better. Thus, rehearsals were taken very seriously. The result as one RI taught us was, “readiness eases the mind”. So, why not rehearse comps after you mission plan for them?


VISUALIZE YOUR WAYS. Start to imagine what doing well would look like. You don’t have to be a Sufi mystic to know that visualization of performance-based tasks gives you an edge. Dr. Charles Garfield from the UC Med School has observed, "I've discovered that numerous peak performers use the skill of mental rehearsal of visualization. They mentally run through important events before they happen."


REIVEW FALLACIES. It doesn’t hurt to review logical fallacies to self-assess if you have drifted into some of them unaware. I know I must. I try to do so quarterly. There are several good sites. Here is one to for starters. http://www.logicalfallacies.info/ Survey the ‘taxonomy’ of fallacies running down the right side of the page. Ask yourself if you are unwittingly making any of those mistakes. Usually, the correction becomes self-evident once you read about the fallacy. If you are honest, you might be surprised how badly you think.

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