See my submission items here:

Paper (PDF) and Presentation

In my qualification exam, I utilized the magnetohydrodynamics grid code FLASH (Fryxell et al. 2000) to design protoplanetary disks and examine the effects of grid resolution and off-axis disk placement.

One thing to note: my presentation as shown here does not include any of the animations I had during the real thing. The animations (mostly) are appearing text, appearing images, and videos of simulations that played.

Advice (still being added to):

Notice, that in my paper abstract I talk about “ram pressure stripping”, supernova blasts and some other concepts that ultimately do not appear in my presentation. This is becasue I set out to do much more than I was able to accomplish. And that’s okay! One of the things your commitee will look for is your understanding of what you could do and how you would do it.

You are in no way expected to be presenting ground-breaking discoveries in your qualification exam. But you will need a strong grasp of the background research your work is based on and some idea of how to expand/enhance your research to the point of a thesis project.