Congratulations to Natalie Hoffmeister for passing her PhD candidacy exam (here we call it the “A exam”) in great shape on Thursday. Like all A exams in the Field of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Natalie’s was an oral exam that covered a wide (and unpredictable) range of topics, in this case from statistics to the genetics of local adaptation, with a few forays into all manner of other topics… Personally I’m never really sure whether the A exam is more a necessary step or simply a professional rite of passage, but in either case Natalie did great.
