newage2012

If you can, next time try Santa Klaus. At the university level, we all taught about the seriousness of plagiarism, but seems nobody talk about problem with creative / fictitious writing. I know of Indian professors in the U.S. use SCIgen to compose a paper to submit to computer science conferences. Guess what, most of them rack up a lot of acceptances to their CV and eventually get their tenure.

http://compgeom.cs.uiuc.edu/~jeffe/ No shit. "I have the lowest undergraduate GPA (2.4/4.0) of any professor I've ever met, but some of my colleagues came close. I really shouldn't be proud of that."

Yep in fact NSF were kind enough to reopen the reference letter submission module until this Friday (18th). I have 5 reference, 2 went AWOL. Now they have the time to finish it.

I don't. At all. I mentioned my work with the Salvation Army of Hong Kong and Macau Command, and I also mentioned in my personal statement that one of my co-worker/girlfriend died in a street protest in Hong Kong, gives me the "driving force" to change the world. Some very strong competition here . Hope that the rumor about "geographical distribution" of awards is true.

If I remember correctly, the computer grading algorithm rolled out sometime during 2008. If you have time you can try the algorithm using the ETS ScoreItNow service. You probably will see a score drop

It is graded by computer. Not a human. To score a 6 you need to know what the grading algorithm is, and tailor your writing towards it.

Now this essay is being graded by the machine. I wish i type more garbage onto the screen, even if it just repeating the same sentence over and over again. The longer the essay, the higher the AW score. It is a little bit puzzling that my AW score dropped by a full 1 point after almost THREE years.

Wow i better point it out on my own SOP too. For my first 2 years in community college i never went below 25 credit hours per term (it was on quarter system and about 6 courses per quarter INCLUDING SUMMER). By the time I transfer out I racked 210 quarter hours, in UIC that converts into 141 semester hours, and continue the last two years with additional 73 hours. So 214 semester hours when I got my bachelors.

WARNING: For ApplyYourself, once you submit the application, you can no longer change the name of the recommenders. I submit two apps to UIUC and then one of the recommenders go AWOL. Huge pain in the a$$ trying to track him.

I smell "UChicago" all over the place. It was pain in the a$$ to explain why I transferred from a community college to a four-year university. (The answer is so obvious that you can probably answer that for me!)

During Fall semester of 2008 UIC has undergoing a serious budget cut. The unit I was working in was threatened to laid off some of the staff. I was so damned worried that I decided to stay office a little bit longer than usual. Because if I got fired means no tuition waiver. For that semester alone I rolled in THREE 4-Graduate credit hour 'C's. I ask my recommenders and they all said it is beneficial to put this on the SOP because it was so obvious on the transcript. All other terms I was rolling in A's.

First of all make sure you have taken advantage of the GRE fee-redaction waiver. It gives you 50% off the testing fee. You definitely want to make mention of this in your SOP, as the test score is probably way-off from your other credentials (most adcomm will spot this and raise hell).

http://grediagnostic.ets.org/ For those who take the CBT General, once you got your mail report you can go to the above website to see how many questions you got right or wrong, along with the difficulty level (but not the questions themselves obviously). It was suprised that I got 5 questions wrong (including the very first one) in the Quant part and still got a 790.

From the scores alone you stand a great chance. The GRE verbal and analytical writing doesn't really matter.

If you take the paper based test, it takes 6 weeks for that to show up.

LOL You exercise your rights, you will be the first one to show the door when a budget cut comes. I constantly spent 30% more time in my office on campus than my assigned hours without overtime pay. Guess what? Last December when the budget cut for our office was announced, one grad student got laid off, all other student got 50% reduction in work hours (thus the pay), and I got to keep all my 20 hours (plus the tuition waiver) afloat. For that, at least my PhD dream is still alive for now. This is our culture. I am proud of my Chinese heritage.

I have my BS in EE and finishing my MS in the same field. I applied to switch to the PhD program in Computer Science for spring 2010 and got approved in 5 days.... no letters of rec needed, no questions asked etc.

Writing score doesn't matter if you are not applying to humanities programs.

In my opinion it doesn't matter. The higher ranking the school, the more restrictions on your research topics. A lower rank school might allow you to do weird topics. As for making a name for yourself, if you consider yourself good researcher, you can pretty much make you name for yourself and "pull the stunt" anywhere you go. My philosophy is, "Do the most with the least". Again, your mileage may vary.

I applied 5 PhD programs in 4 schools, all within the area for logistical and family reasons. One of them already got accepted and that is my "safety school".

So i took the GRE and just came back. I need to use that to apply for some fellowships. But do you think that schools put more weight on your GRE on more weight on your graduate GPA? I will finish my master's program this fall.

I just came back a couple of hours ago. I raised a whopping *230* points since last time (See my sig for details).

Watch when your insurance company denies your claim because you have secret "pre-condition" that you never even know about. Private insurance companies are there to make profit, not to save your ass. Wait until the ObamaCare comes along, then we can talk about REAL medical insurance. And you miss a chance to start early on your credit history, a mistakes that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars later in mortgage interest because you have short credit history. Unless you are not even thinking about buying a house.

Or better yet put into an IRA account, you can write that off on next year tax returns. Or use the money to pay off high interest credit card debt from your undergrad years.

OK yet another IP-Board user. I have been to like six different forums using the same layout