TheMercySeat

Coordinated grey suit from The Limited with black pumps and a black purse. Hey girl, haaaay

I think ETS should feature items on the GRE that women and minorities consistently outperform white males in. just to see how society reacts

I think something we all learned is that a 'good' test is both valid and reliable. Does the GRE *really* measure what it is suppose to measure? The correlations here are sad, and the GRE Q is even negatively correlated with time to completion: http://internal.psychology.illinois.edu/~nkuncel/gre%20meta.pdf The above article found that the subject GRE is consistently a stronger predictor of nearly all graduate school outcomes. It doesn't make sense to me why universities hold the General GREs in high regard while consistently ignoring the subject GREs, especially if schools are truly concerned about using the GREs as an indicator of academic success and retention.

Yup!!! They're official: http://www.ets.org/s/gre/pdf/snapshot.pdf It's works out well for Caucasian men between the ages of 18-22. Not so much for everybody else

Thank you, thank you, thank you for this!!! I HATE this question.

Agreed! I'm also a female over the age of 25. According to the means ETS posts for my demographic, I did a spectacular job. (Q particularly deteriorates with age, and females score lower on Q and V). According to the expectations of PhD programs, I bombed it :x.

:raises hand meekly: I had to literally reteach myself everything. Everything. I work in research. I get paid to calculate Cohen's d, eta squared, and Bayesian probabilities by hand. I use R and SPSS to do everything else from CFAs and binary logistic regressions to ANOVAs. I haven't had a math class with exception to stat since... 2008. I don't know wtf the square root of -54 divided by 72 to the 5th exponet plus Z cubed is. Sorry everybody.

This waiting is driving me nutters! On the bright side, I just extended out my time at SPSP. I'm taking a road trip through the Salton Sea to Yuma Territorial Prison

I'm personally taking into consideration how many pubs students have throughout the course of a PhD. What numbers are you all hearing? On department alleged 15, while another said 1-3. Not clear on what I should expect

I feel like there's always somebody that tries really hard to make me feel inadequate. I usually have more pubs than that person

I can't curse, have more than one beer at the bar (I want extra beer after a high pressure situation!), smoke, or be (too) sarcastic. Plus I'm awful when it comes to getting a good night's rest at somebody else's house. They're hard

Thanks!!! NRC is so foreign to me. I'm shocked to see Bryn Mawr and Rutgers psych have such low rankings!

Here's a question on ranking: how should I interpret a R1 institution that perhaps ranks lower on NRC rankings than a non-R1 institution? I didn't even consider distinction/ranking until now and I feel too far removed from academia (graduated in 2010) to have a thorough understanding of such implications.

Yup! If you look up the distribution by age: http://www.ets.org/s/gre/pdf/snapshot.pdf The mean consistently drops for both genders on quant. With the under prediction problem (female Q scores under predict), race gaps, and age gaps, I'm surprised the GRE is held in high regard

That too!!! the one study that popped a barely significant, negligible first year correlation relied on post-hoc observation without the benefit of a comparison group or even randomization. It's bad 'science' and the abuse of psychometrics. Moreover, the gender/race gaps in mean scores across subscales are concerning-- such a system is guilty of endorsing and promoting 'white male privilege' in that regard (or there's the alternative hypothesis-- "women and minorities aren't as bright"-- which I don't buy for a second)

Yet there's a paucity of evidence indicating that the GRE predicts retention in a PhD program and what little evidence there is of it loses significance after the first year. Ironic!

Do 'bad,' fully funded PhD programs exist? I hope not! Ranking wasn't even a consideration when I applied.

I agree with some of this, but still... I would be in a better place if instead of being forced to take theology and the history of East Asia, I had the opportunity to take programming courses. I can read about theology and East Asia on my own, but I am in no position to drop several grand on SAS (http://www.execinfosys.com/productsold/pcbundle_2.pdf) so that I can teach myself the program. The dichotomy between academic v. nonacademic research seems contrived to me... both use the same processes, require the same skills, compete for grants from the same sources, and borrow each others' resources (interns, visiting scholars in industry positions, professors as consultants, scientists as adjuncts, etc)

Apply to Villanova! It's research-intensive, fully funded, and most students go into reputable PhD programs. I believe Lehigh has a strong rep, too

Thanks!!! Follow up question: do non-quant programs tend to present opportunities for students to learn Python, Java, C/C++, Matlab, etc? I know R.... but not from academia.

"What do you want to do after you graduate?" was the first thing out of the mouth of every professor I met with, hence why I spoke of my career aspirations. Moreover, upon graduating with my BA and MA (terminal program-- full scholarship), I had an awful time trying to get a decent job. Awful. I discovered that most things that I learned in college failed to translate into real world skills and that I did not know enough statistical programs + computer programming languages for even the most basic entry level research assistant jobs. I finally have a decent job, but I vowed to never let academia fail me again by failing to train me for jobs that exist. These are things that I never once considered once while enrolled in my BA or MA program... academia can be great, but all programs have a start date and an end date. Also note that unemployment data typically counts part time jobs as gainfully employed, even if they're making $20,000 a year as an adjunct. Thank you for these insights, though. I will avoid dropping references to the job market/future on interviews in the future... at the end of the day, I only really need the credential for the type of job that I have in mind.

I'm so torn at the moment. I'm afraid that I will be locked out of PhD programs if I state that I want to be a research scientist, but I really don't want to be prepared for jobs that don't really exist anymore (tenure track professorship) Also, I have an industry job and some of the scientists here adjunct on the side.

I work at the intersection of I/O and quant, hence why my colleagues are recent PhDs with jobs I am interviewing for psychology and law, social, and community programs. Social folks made me nervous on "the talk"

A little bit! I was hoping to get more. I mean, there has to be more than tech skills, right?! Plus I am including academia in this topic.

Ha! Thanks. It seems like everybody there is engrossed with apps, though (I don't blame them). I just asked a similar question on that forum, though.. I am having a very hard time engaging people on this topic at interviews, which exception to the recent PhDs I work with (which we all know is not a representative sample). There's so much silence and uncertainty regarding job prospects, with exception to the angry/depressed PhDs who are unemployed