Starting tomorrow, and for the next week, I'll be taking my comprehensive exams for the Cognitive Science PhD program. I'll be emailed 4 broad questions relating to the coursework I've taken over the past two years, and I'll have to choose 3 to answer.

The questions are typically broad, allowing for answers that incorporate knowledge from multiple fields, like linguistics, neuroscience, and computer science (modeling and simulations).

Here are a couple of samples of the sort of questions I might see:

If you were attempting to build a robot that exhibits cognitive properties similar to those in humans, which attributes would be more or less difficult to include, based on our current state of knowledge?

or

How do humans acquire language?

or

Defend our Cognitive Science program to the State Legislature.

Each paper will probably be around 15 pages, supported with plenty of sources. So...blogging will be light to non-existent for the next week.