Bypassing into PhD :O

I started my graduate journey in the M.ASc path but I always had an eye on the prospect of bypassing into the PhD stream - if I enjoyed my project & lab enough. Earlier this year, I began the process of weighing out my pros/cons - keeping in mind that there was still a lot of unknowns in my decision given the ongoing pandemic. Eventually, after discussing with my prior mentor, my partner, parents and family, I finally was able to conclude that I wanted to bypass.

After speaking with my supervisor, and getting his preliminary approval we began the process of the bypass exams. For my department, I had to have a committee meeting with 2 other faculty members 3-4 months before the exam date. And I had to bypass 12-14 months in (September-October 2021 for me). Thus, I made an unofficial goal to have the committee meeting in May/June and bypass in August.

The first step, finding committee members was quite challenging to be honest. One was already "pre-determined" as she had similar research objectives and was in conversation with my supervisor regularly. However, we were on the search for another professor who had either some knowledge in molecular dynamic simulations or in protein design. This is where I wish there was a better system to search and rank members based on their work and behaviour on the committee. I was giving the future 4/5 years of my grad school to someone I knew solely based off a superficial google search - talk about scary!

Eventually, I was able to land on someone who had very impressive and very similar interests and expertise relating to what my project included. I reached out to both professors and asked for them to sit on my committee. When I tell you I was nervous - my hands were sweating, I re-re-read the email, asked several people to read/edit and anxiously kept refreshing my mailbox waiting for their reply. Pleasantly, they both replied fairly promptly accepting the invitation.

The next step is deciding the date & preparing for the meeting!!