I am an international applicant graduating from a not-so-prestigious university. I had an unlucky day and got really low scores in verbal (147) and writing sections (3.0) of GRE. My writing score looks especially bad as I am in the lower 14 percentile. I was able to get 170 from the quantitative section.
In short my credentials are:
GRE: Q-170, V-147, AWA-3.0
GPA: 3.83/4.00 ( I'm ranked 1st in my department, and probably graduate top 3 in the faculty of engineering) (also almost 4.00 major GPA, only one BA, rest is A)
TOEFL: 104
I have decent LORs from my professors. (but again they are not that well-known)
I have no publications, but I had the chance to intern at Siemens Corporate Research for 6 months in Princeton.
The schools I'm planning to apply are [i will cut the list according to your feedback]:
Long Shot
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Columbia
Purdue
UT Austin
GaTech
Possible
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NYU-Poly
SUNY-Stony Brook
Rutgers
UT Dallas
USC
Rochester Institute of Technology
Safe
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SUNY-Binghamton
Stevens Institute of Technology
I believe having no publications is not going to hurt that much as I'm going for Masters, but I am concerned that my Verbal and AWA scores would hurt my chances.
Do you think I should retake GRE? I am confident I would get a better score in writing, but not so sure about verbal part. However I am reluctant to retake it if I have good chances of being admitted to any of the "possible" schools as I find the exam too stressful and exhausting.
