Loric

You actually have them ranked in a strict order already for yourself..? Have you even set foot on these campuses?

Top 3 or 4, including that school and never listing it last. Top 5 if you're in a fairly large applicant pool with your degree.
 
If they're #1, of course list them as #1. No one wants to see their program as outside of the top 3.

I don't even know what R1 means..
 
I do know that Purdue really dislikes it when you misspell their name as if they produced chicken. Had an adminstrator write me a very terse email once when I wrote a story about one of his grads taking over a position at a major company. On my own little obscure blog.
 
Ok.. so.. let's rank this!
 
Flyover State Schools:
U of Tennessee U of Nebraska U of Oregon Somethings that Sounds Overly Religious:
Southern Methodist U Chicken People:
Perdue Places Named After Superhero Men:
Kent State Wayne State Hippies:
U of Colorado Boulder Other:
South Carolina U U of Washington Rochester There, whoo.. that was some tough ranking but I think it'll help you pick the right school.

Some do say "list your 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choice schools" or other things that are asking you for an inclusive list.

Find him and staple it to his forehead!

I'm in awe of your patience. You're practically a saint. (legit, not-snarky.)

Oh yes, telling the program it's "their fault" will go over well..

Some do say "list your 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choice schools" or other things that are asking you for an inclusive list.

I have nothing but contempt for weakness. I suggest for your sake you adopt the same outlook.

Stop putting % after the number.. that's not how the English works. It's "98th percentile."

It's a reordering of clauses. I do it all the time - and some people think I can't write. It's a habit of certain folks..
 
At the same time, I've lived off royalties for the books i've written. It's a matter of what people are willing to accept and what their exposure to the language is. If they're entirely rigid, formal, and not well read they will have trouble with such a sentence. It's not a typical or easy sentence. It's not wrong, it's not what people expect.
 
A story I like to tell in such situations.. way back in my AP Lit class in high school the students had to read and edit each other's essays. The valedictorian was reading my paper, me the barely-a C avg student who slept through class but never got less than an A on anything I wrote. She took offense to my sentence structure. We argued. She walked it up to the teacher, certain I was going to be told to change my wording.
 
My teacher looked it over and said.. "What's the problem?" The valedictorian became so indignant and tried to express all the grammatical reasons the sentence was flawed.
 
The teacher lowered her glasses, look at the paper once more, and replied.. "If it's good enough for Mr. Thoreau, it's good enough for Mr. Loric."
 
And jaw agape, that was the end of the valedictorian's edit of my paper. The teacher wrote A+ on it and handed it back to her. "You could learn something you know.."

They'll hate you.
 
If this is the route you want to go, go with something like Interfolio and get a generic letter and tell the writer you want to use it for multiple schools.
 
Frame it as you saving the writer the time, effort, etc.. of writing out multiple letters.. but dont tell them it's 18. Cuz that's legit insane.

You actually have them ranked in a strict order already for yourself..? Have you even set foot on these campuses?

I fail to see how a degree that let you make all your decisions at home at your own pace while hiding under a security blanket, sipping herbal tea, and sniffing sachets of lavender benefitted you at all in becoming a professional of anything.
 
Maybe a professional cat hoarder.
 
In the other thread people are saying the idea of being medicated to get past the stress/anxiety isn't right. Well then what is? Either it's clinical and needs treatments or someone is just whining an awful lot over something they need to cowboy up and get over.
 
The inability to get over it says, to me, that you don't have what it takes to make it in grad school.

You are presented with a task.
 
There are many ways to complete the task, but your final score of how "well" you did the task is going to determine your future options. You know how the result will be measured and you know the factors that play into the final grade.
 
If your undergraduate program did not prepare you well to deal with these sorts of situations and how to succeed at them, then it failed you.
 
If you cannot "pass" the GRE then I do worry about how you're going to handle graduate school. If has nothing to do with the content of the test. It has everything to do with an apparent inability to pass this particular test despite knowing it was coming for literally years.

Most people's GPA's and GRE's line up...

Is your high GPA at a big 10 enough to offset a poor showing on the GRE though..?
 
If your goal was graduate study - or something beyond which requires graduate study - then your program and school failed you by not preparing you properly for what is a standard test expected of most students.

I went to a 4 year university but I was in the arts. Some of my classes were literally doing Yoga 3x a week for 1.5 hours. I still took 100's of other tests, mostly with scantrons, to get my degree.
 
The people who say they didn't take tests make me seriously question the validity of their degree.

But I will

So I want a degree that recently popped up, created from the ground up new - an MFA.
 
It's a design degree but intermingles with film and performance as much as it does visual art.  The primary reason I want it is because of the internships the students in the program are doing, which are great connections in a closed industry that's near impossible to break into without "knowing" someone.
 
But as I alluded to, no one even has the degree yet (the program isnt old enough) it's the only program of its kind and only offered at one school....
 
I don't know, my app is in and i'm being considered as we speak so there's no turning back in that sense. I'm going if I get accepted. I guess it's that I wish that there were more options or even a backup plan. It's pretty much "please take me.. you're my only hope Obi Wan.."
 
And it feels so weird to be in that position. For background, I went into an MFA theatre design program originally. My undergrad is theatrical design. I've been doing boring "day job" work for a few years after having left the theatre program I was in because I was fed up.
 
The new program is actually the career I wanted. It just didn't exist before so I went into theatrical design as a "related" field.. only to get constantly picked on because of my interests and career aspiration "That's not real art!"
 
So.. I'm very torn on the whole thing. I think going after what I want, and have wanted, is the right move. An opportunity is presenting itself and i'd be silly to ignore it. At the same time, I'm worried with it being a new program at a private school it might all end up being a very expensive waste of time with far more promises than actual rewards.
 
What do you think?

Or just add the safety schools. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

I have nothing but contempt for weakness. I suggest for your sake you adopt the same outlook.

Yes, test anxiety is a legit thing.
 
On the other hand.. you're applying to grad school. You have gotten through high school which is wrought with standardized tests by getting good enough grades and scores (on standardized tests, no less) in order to get into college.
 
Then in college you almost certainly, at the bare minimum, faced some standardized tests at the midpoint and end of every semester for 4 years.
 
That's a lot of tests. You'd think there'd be some coping skills developed by now. You had to have done halfway decent on these tests to be realistically considering graduate school.
 
So what's going on with this forum and the apparent mass freakout of "omg! test anxiety!!!!!!" self fullfilling prophecy?
 
I have this feeling that if there was less emphasis on people's test anxiety as an excuse for a poor score, there'd be more focus on getting better at taking the test... so you don't have to take it for a 27th time.

I'm starting to think no one actually knows why everyone wants to get into Berkeley other than "it's the thing to do."
 
Just a thought.. if you cant easily articulate why you want to attend.. you dont stand much of a chance writing it out in your PS/SOP/etc.

When you consider this, consider the number of people on Grad Cafe alone who say they're applying for 10 or more schools.
 
If the schools all accept someone.. and having limits, reject someone else.. that's 10 schools and only 1 is getting the student, while the other 9 are scrambling to either pull from the waitlist or actually backtrack and admit people they rejected. It happens all the time.
 
It's not a position anyone wants to be in.