Grad School Blues
2 Oct
I’m temporarily unable to talk about or think about anything else. Grad school applications are a full time job. They should ideally be done with no other commitment on the horizon, preferably for a period of 1-3 months. Why? From my experience thus far, it seems to me that the reason why it’s so demanding is that it weeds out those have neither the willingness or ability to push through challenges of Sisyphean proportions. Which may be an indication of the life you’re signing up for for the next 1-5 years.
As a word of advice to those contemplating it — plan early, plan ahead, and do whatever it takes. What you need: a decent GPA, 3 letters of recommendation, a resume, a series of essays, and to top it all off, standardized tests. These may not sound like much, but the amount of preparation that goes into this is unimaginable. I have never worked harder in my life.
International students to work a little harder. First off, if you live in a country where English is an official language but isn’t necessarily white, your English abilities come under some scrutiny. Some schools want TOEFL(Test of English as a Foreign Language); others don’t. I’m just not willing to pay USD150 to get myself tested in English when I live it, breathe it, dream in it, and am published in (there’s also a part of me that will be forever bruised if I don’t score a perfect score in it; and I suck at standardized tests).
Then there’s the GRE(Graduate Record Examination), which so many institutions require. It puzzles me how 30 verbal questions, and 45 maths questions about fractions and integers and geometry — primary school level math — and two short essays, indicate in any way my readiness for higher education. That bit isn’t too bad. If you live in Singapore, good luck to you. To schedule the test, you have to either (a) call an office in Kuala Lumpur that never picks up the phone, or (b) attempt to register on a terminally slow website. If you went with (b), as I did, you may get a phone call the next day to tell you that the test you signed up for — already the only one with vacancies left for the next 3 months, actually doesn’t exist, that the test you signed up for has been moved to.. either December (way past the application deadline for Berkeley) or tomorrow. And then to spend another 25 minutes on a phone to Kuala Lumpur with clueless customer service that barely speaks English, who helpfully advises that since all dates in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur are full until December, you can consider taking the exam in Bangkok. Or Jakarta. Or India? Yes, we have cheap air tickets and all, but there’s something to be said about flying to another country to sit for 75 multiple choice English and math questions. The ETS representative in my part of the world is substandard. How anyone can allow bookings for a test date only to then retract it and say you need to take it tomorrow, or wait a few months or fly to another country, is quite beyond me.
I don’t know what I’m running on at the moment — definitely not coffee. Not a day passes without preparing for the GRE, sorting out my recommendations, speaking with admissions or faculty or alumni from potential schools, or bugging my existing school administration for exact transcript dates, all while finishing a loaded last 7 weeks at school, and working on freelance writing projects in my “free time”. I’m too busy to think about turning twenty two (in five days), but I’m lucky I have someone to do that thinking for me.
Isn’t it blatantly obvious I really, really want to go (to New York)?
