kurumi2117

Success story here! I took the GRE twice. Had high verbal and analytical but low quant scores (32nd and 48th percentile). I have already been admitted to 5/10 programs I applied to, and most are highly ranked (top 10) within their subfield. The faculty I've spoken with said that I was competitive because I had 3 excellent and detailed letters of rec, a great SOP, and excellent ft with the program. I'd focus on those components of your application the most. Please feel free to PM me if you have other questions. Good luck!

I did, but only radio silence from them. Pretty sure their invites already went out, so I'm thinking I'm out of the game.

For what type of programs? Clinical only?

I didn't post my GREs/GPAs publicly because I feel that program fit, SOP, and letters of rec are all far more important. They certainly were in my case, at least. Plus, we are all crazy enough on here as it is without adding fuel to the fire. There really is no good quantitative way to predict whether or not you'll get in to a certain school.

In my experience, stipends for psychology programs are usually between $15,000 and $25,000 depending on the area. You have to keep cost of living in mind; generally, cost of living is lower in rural areas or areas in the midwest/south and higher in the northeast/west. Regardless of cost of living adjustment, stipends are not typically going to provide you with much more than is enough to survive.

I did and I have not heard from them.

If willing, can the people who posted acceptances for Child Psychology at University of Minnesota PM me? Thanks and good luck everyone.

I applied to HDFS. If you want to know the schools and who I've heard back from, PM me. On a similar note, does anyone have any insight into job prospects for HDFS versus Developmental Psychology?

Has anyone lived in Broadstone Vesada or Spruce Village apartments? Thoughts?

Hi all! Just wanted to introduce myself and say out of the 14 programs I am applying to, two are in the area of Child-Clinical Psychology. My interests cut across HDFS, Child-Clinical, and Developmental so I applied to a range. How is everyone surviving the waiting game? I have applied to 9/14 programs as of the 1st and I'm already losing my mind. Anyone else in the same boat as me in terms of interests? Good luck y'all!

I think that's a good strategy. I worked fast so I could spend the remaining time (I had about five-ten minutes) checking my answers. I caught a few errors on the first few questions and I believe this helped improve my score a lot.

I got a 164 the first time I took the Verbal. Honestly, I feel the best way to prepare for this section of the GRE is to read and work on retaining what you read. And I don't mean read stuff from your own field, but read things like the New York Times, The New Yorker, or Best American Short Stories. When you come across vocabulary you don't know, write the word down, learn it, and use it. Talk to other people about what you've read. This will help you with reading comprehension. Plus, it's way more entertaining than memorizing long vocabulary word lists. Even if you only have a few weeks before you retake, I still think this is a good way to study in addition to taking practice tests. You do not have to know the exact definition of every vocabulary word on the GRE to get a great score. You just need to have some familiarity with some of the words so that you can narrow down the choices. Solid test-taking strategies can also help with this; for example, on the fill-in-the-blank questions, immediately figure out the relationship between the blanks and the rest of the sentence (i.e., do the words need to be opposite or similar in meaning, both in relation to each other and to the content of the sentence?). Then you can go through the words you are familiar with and get rid of ones that obviously don't fit. From there, you can guess with a higher probability of guessing correctly. For the reading comprehension questions, being able to focus on material that doesn't immediately interest you is a great skill that you can develop by reading stuff outside of your own discipline. This will also help you generate better examples for your essays during the AW section. For that section, I think it comes down to fully understanding the prompt, knowing how to execute a five paragraph essay, and impeccable timing. I used the first five minutes to read the prompt and develop an outline of a five paragraph essay (introduction, example 1 paragraph, example 2 paragraph, example 3 paragraph, conclusion). I gave myself about four minutes to write each paragraph. If I got stuck, I dropped the 3rd example paragraph. The last five minutes I spent quickly revising and proofreading as well as adding in some "big" words and more sentence structure variety. Hope this helps!

I'd say your scores sound solid. As many on these boards have said before, good GRE scores aren't going to get you in but bad ones can keep you out. If you fall near the posted average, you are at or above the scores of many who were admitted. Just relax and work on more important parts of your application like SOP, etc. Hope that helps!

I would not include a letter with anything negative in it. I agree with previous posts; ask him if he can supply the rationale in the letter. If he says no, I would ask someone else.

Thanks so much for your opinions! If nothing else, it helps me tame my crazy at this point in the process.