The Drubin/Barnes Lab would like to congratulate Rebecca Lu who passed her qualifying exam on Wednesday, April 18!

Our note to Rebecca reads: “Congrats! We used to like you! We still do! But we used to, too!”

Here we recount the epic saga of Rebecca’s Ph.D qualification:

After she wrote her proposal, her chair asked her to rewrite it.  Rebecca is smarter than Randy Schekman though.  She just made a copy.

Rebecca brought food for her committee, and Doug Koshland said, ‘I’m gonna have a donut.  Does anyone want one?’ That’s when Rebecca realized that a Qualifying Exam is like some weird quiz where your committee reveals the answers before asking their questions.

During Rebecca’s exam, her committee didn’t ask her a question for 30 minutes.  That would have been a REALLY long question, after all.

Rebecca closed her eyes a lot during her Qual.  She wasn’t sleeping.  She just drew a picture of Randy handing her the Nobel Prize on the back of her eyelids.

You can’t please all the people all the time.  Fortunately, all those people weren’t at Rebecca’s Qualifying Exam.

When her exam was over, Randy said, “Guess what.  You passed.”  Rebecca told Randy, “Dude, you gotta give me time to guess.  If you’re gonna quiz me, you must insert a pause in there.”

Akemi Kunibe was the last grad student in the Drubin/Barnes Lab to pass her Qual.  She’s smart.  She was a tough act to follow.  Rebecca will be an especially hard act to follow, cuz when she finished her Qual, she took all of the dry-erase markers with her.

Rebecca doesn’t know the meaning of the word “fail.”  And that is kinda worse than not passing in a way, if you think about it.  She’s a Ph.D candidate, but she still doesn’t understand simple words.

Congratulations Rebecca Lu!  And thank you Mitch Hedberg for the jokes!