Purdue Nuclear Engineering PhD Qualification Exams - Example Problems, Study Guides, and Tutorials
Alex Hagen | PhDNE - 2017 (hopefully!)
What follows is the product of two years of work and collaboration from
several students around the department, all of which successfully
completed their PhDNE qualifying exams. The cornerstone of the material
is ~50 “tutorials”, which are one page white papers on very specific
topics that were favorite topics on the qualifying exams during the
time of writing (2012-2015). I also include study guides, which are
simply cursory coverage of the textbooks assigned, and I may provide
“example problems”, which are similar to problems that have been asked
on past exams. My goal is to provide directed, sound, and
comprehensive advice on what to study and how in depth to go, as well as
to provide more material (in the way that Texas A&M has) for students
studying for the exam. I feel that directing students as they prepare
will make the students better engineers. I, for one, feel I am a better
engineer for having learned to pass the Purdue PhDNE qualification
exams.
Tutorials
These tutorials were the corner stone of my studying for qualification
exams. I intend them to be used as extended flashcards. I personally
copied each of the tutorials below \(15\times\) as a way to memorize
them, and that worked incredibly well. It may have been that I had to
pour over material to generate the tutorials, but still, I think it’s a
good tactic.
