LawlQuals

I also took it in the old format, where each section (verbal and quantitative) were each worth 800 points. If you only need a score of 820 total, that is only 51.25%. It is a low score to obtain, but it does not mean you only need to get that many questions right since the grading is more careful. If English is your native language, and while it is dangerous to say this out loud, you could get above 820 without studying. In colleges of engineering, people tend to cite 1300 as being an agreeable lower bound for doing well enough, and to still be competitive for fellowships. You can get into places like MIT with a score as low as 1300 in engineering (I had friends who did, but certainly it depends on your field). The grading process is harder to follow, I never bothered with it, you just need to know what it does. The older test was computer adaptive by question. The way it used to work was that if you get a question right, it might ask you a harder question, if you get a question wrong they might ask you a slightly easier question. The idea is to eventually converges on your overall competency (measured by the score you receive). *How* that happens and how it is mapped to a score I do not know exactly, and it never really mattered. You do not have to get every question right to get a perfect score, you just have to get enough of them right so you converge on that level. However, "Currently, the GRE revised General Test allows the test-taker to move forth and back, and change answers within a section, and thus the questions in a given section are not adaptive. While questions within each section are not adaptive, performance on the first Verbal and Quantitative section influences the difficulty in the second section of the same topic." [Wiki]. So, the convergence and changing of difficulty happens by section, not per question now. If you do well in one section, the next section will be harder, if you do poorly the next section will be easier, and so on. As noted before, you do not need to get every question right to get a perfect score, it is about what level you converge at, not how many questions you get right in the sense of a strict percentage for your score. This is really all that matters to know as a test taker, the general way the scoring aims to work.

I went to UW - Madison for my MS (nuclear engineering), though I did have ties with the ECE department as well. No one knows a percentage of who gets funding, but UW - Madison does regrettably have a habit (and reputation) of admitting students without funding. Very few people who I met though were "rogue" students with no funding, though they did exist. Out of the ECE students I met, there were probably about 3 students I met who had to fend for themselves for one or two semesters while they tried to secure funding. That is not to say there were not more of them though. "does anybody know whether or not ECE has a policy to offer TA positions to first-year international student?" What do you mean by policy? TA positions are fair game to anyone, I was a TA in my department, I do not know how they "selected" me out of everyone else, but it likely had nothing to do with measuring me against my peers, I just checked a box that said I was willing to be a TA for funding on my application. TAs come and go, some screw up so badly that they lose their funding. That is to say, there is no detailed screening process if that is your question, but you do need the bare minimum credentials, such as speaking tests in English. I knew a TA in the engineering physics department who was an international student from China, we got that position his first semester there. I also knew several Indians who had TA positions. Plenty of international students get TA jobs their first semester. But, as I was saying earlier, which is (for want of a better word) the downfall of UW - Madison is that they do have a habit of admitting more students than they have funding for. All you can do is hope for the best. If you want to go there though, you can find some kind of funding on your own, you will just have to be patient and rough it until you can figure it out. Congrats on the unofficial acceptance by the way! I applied to ECE as a re-entry student, maybe I will see you there in the Fall.

None of us can tell you if it is impossible or not, we do not know your capability. Since you are in graduate school now, you know what you can and cannot do given your experience in undergrad and one semester in grad school. Typically, I would say that hoping to earn substantially higher grades over just one semester is unrealistic, but as I said, only you know what you can do. You may wish to speak to your adviser about this as well to seek his/her advice. Remember, you are not in this totally alone. Best of luck!

The disagreement here I think is being more pronounced because of people not addressing different fields. Natsteel is in the humanities, grades mean different things in different fields. I agree, a B+ is a respectable grade, so is a B in physical sciences and engineering. At my alma maters, the average grade in classes where letter grades were assigned as per a distribution was a C or B-. Getting a C or B- would be unremarkable to me, but getting two of those in your major classes is not something I feel is warrant to pass immediate judgment on the student's absolute capability, dubbing them underqualified. To each their own though.

The thing about LaTeX is that once you get a handle on it, you very well might end up loving how "involved" it is. Start slow, and experiment with it on a few of your assignment submissions. I started out using 'getting to grips with LaTeX' tutorials, which you may locate readily via search. That helped me get started (junior year of undergrad), and I got better, learned more on every lab report I submitted, and every assignment I decided to typeset. I learned outside of this primer, from the not-so short introduction to LaTeX, talking with others for troubleshooting, but mostly by googling each query I had as it came to me. Now that I have been using it for more than 5 years, I have picked up a lot about it. Though, in no way would I still call myself an advanced user given the manner in which Iearned it, but I still am able to produce exactly what I want, the way I want it to look. Some universities have free seminars for LaTeX new users you may wish to check out if available. There are shortcut applications that do much of the typesetting for you, such as Lyx, though I have not tried them out. I fear those would also be damaging for a new user's education in LaTeX, for it would not provide direct incentive to learn it in a raw fashion. If you use something like Lyx, you would use it essentially like MS word, which would prohibit you from knowing how to use it, and because of that lack of knowledge you do not know how much better you could be doing it.

I mostly made friends outside of class, and eventually some of those friends each semester ended up being in classes of mine. Maybe if one direction is not working out, you might try working from the outside in.

Your GRE scores are better than mine for quantitative and verbal, except I did score a 6 on the writing portion. I got into the #1 and #2 schools for my program in the country even with my (low) GRE score (530Q 730V, 6W). I think you did fine. It does send off a tentative red flag, but if you present sound enough essays in your graduate application that should reassure them you understand how to communicate, and that your score is not really representative of your absolute capability. Maybe you had topics to write about that did not resonate with you, maybe you had an off day, who knows. If you can write a good statement, it will remove any question or reluctance regarding your writing skills I would think (though of course I am not on an admissions board). The GRE is not really meaningful, and more of a (shallow) check mark to see that your degree is worth the paper it is printed on. It does not make or break you unless you do much poorer than you did in my opinion. My take on it is that the quantitative section is far too easy (same as SAT with probability thrown in), and the verbal section is far too difficult for the test to be really meaningful. If you would like though, and I cannot say I would not do this because I think I would, you can retake the exam. Note, that you cannot choose which scores you send into an institution. ETS sends in all your GRE scores you have ever taken (that have not expired) when you send score reports. So, if you get a low writing score again, it would reflect negatively on you. (If it caused confusion above, I was commenting on my admissions from Fall 2008 when I first entered graduate school for a masters. I am applying to Ph.D. programs now [as it says in my 'application season' information on the left] after having taken some time away from school)

I think you could benefit from more practice in presenting in general. Gaining a proficiency and comfort in speaking will ensure there is no second thoughts about how you ended up saying something from one run through or the next, you will be able to phrase it in a good way either way. This is something that I think is really beneficial about having a TA position, it gives you general practice repeatedly throughout a semester (for me, 3-4 times a week). I prefer not cluttering my slides with too many words, and try to have mostly pictures (plots, etc.) with *key* points written down for the audience to see and anchor my verbal point making with. Beyond that, what I say during a presentation is worth the breath because it adds to the presentation, the total package is not something that could be obtained by just reading the slides alone. Of course, you naturally have to find a balance with including too little and too much detail. Including just enough detail so that what you say is easily tracked on your slides and does not demand the audience to pay extreme attention to your words and to keep your points in a memory bank to later recall and juxtapose. What you do not want to do is get into the habit of reading anything (which you never said you did, I am speaking generally). In a sense, all my presentations are "entirely improvised." I do not know how I am going to say things before I do it, I just know what content I need to communicate. People may not agree with me, but I discourage over-rehearsing and script writing, it can make presenting unnatural. It is more useful to get into the habit of just talking, so that you understand the pacing required for you to think and choose agreeable phrasing without "misspeaking." This takes some time, but not too much time. Something dire I see some students do is, should they be using something like powerpoint, they crowd their "notes" for each slide with paragraphs of words, what they intended to say. This is dangerous. I once attended a colloquium where someone who had been in my industry for 45 some years, and much of it was in the navy. He made an off-the-cuff remark to the audience a ways into his talk. He stated something to the effect of: "You might notice that I rarely look back at my slides, and that I'm not really saying a whole lot of what is actually up there. This is something you get used to in the Navy. When I used to give presentations, I had a [superior officer] that if he sensed you were reading slides, would cut you off and bark at you 'if all you're going to do is read a speech, get out of the way so we can read, what good are you?,' although he put it much more profanely and directly.' He made a point to tell us that anecdote about how he learned the rough way how to present. I am being pretty loquacious and possibly not touching on relevant points by now. The point is, improvisation is a good thing. Learn to handle it, rather than try to evade it is my advice.

I was a TA for three years, and I would get several of them at the end of the semester. They were either emails or actual cards people placed in my mailbox. I was thoroughly appreciative, they are always really nice to receive. Some students got a little too familiar/flirty with lengthy emails, which I thought were a little silly, but nonetheless I appreciated their effort in thanking me. It was not something they had to do, and it is nice to know that some of your students enjoyed having you as an instructor. I have interacted with a lot of professors, and this conversation topic has come up a few times. All of them had the same idea: a short thank you note is really appreciated, but what they do not like to receive are gifts. The latter are burdensome and just not appropriate. I have sent thank you notes (physical cards) to a couple professors over the years.

Not to be too plainly spoken here, but I have never heard a graduate student complain about "subjective BS." Isn't that what undergrads do? If you perform awesomely, no amount of subjective BS will deny you an awesome grade. I would recommend you aim for that. You got a B+, congrats! You are not going to be able to always do superbly in graduate level classes, as you have seen they are much harder and you have plenty of other distractions (research, and/or teaching, grading). Try not to sweat it, if you are not satisfied you can make a point to do better next semester. In the end, as the previous poster stated: this is part of life. You win some you lose some. Grades matter in the sense that you need to be in good standing from an advanced graduate study perspective (in my department, as a masters student you require a 3.0 GPA, when you pass the qualifiers you obtain a new status which demands you maintain a 3.5 GPA). If you fall below, the can technically require you to exit the program; however, it has been my experience that people who drop below are given as many as three semesters to make it up before they officially do not permit you to continue. Unfortunately, I have known one student who was required to leave because of this. Beyond this, your grades do matter still, for your first job or post-doctoral position. They may also be necessary for fellowships/funding. You do not want to waste your time though, classes are for learning so your principal priority should really be on that in my opinion, rather than on the letter grade in the end. I did know a few graduate students who would plan when they would take certain classes to maximize their GPA at the often compromise of having a less spectacular professor. I cannot understand this.

This happens all the time, where you are hired to be a TA in a field you either do not know anything about or you are just not good at it (maybe it is reflective in the grade you earned in the class when you took it as an undergrad). What I expect, as a fellow former graduate student, is that a new TA has had a good education to the point where they can learn the course material better than their students ahead of time, then teach it. That is what your first semester will probably be like, you studying and doing problems a few days before you teach it to your students in a way you find most clear. After that first semester, you should be pretty pro at it, it is just that can you survive your first semester sort of deal that can be cause for anxiety. Answering questions will come with practice, it is harder to think on your feet in front of a class. If you do not know, students respond positively to candidness. State you are unsure, even commend the question if it is a good enough thought, you can ask if anyone in the class has any ideas, and if no one in the room has any ideas you can say you will think about it more, consult with the other TAs, or the professor about it and get back to them next time. It is important to remember that you are all in this together. You *can* ask the class if anyone has any ideas, it helps them be accountable for their own education as well, and you always learn more when you are actively involved.

I am really not curious about it. Having written plenty of recommendation letters myself, I know what kinds of statements are made in these letters (upon consult with professors about this as well). To read something part embellishment and part truth is not something I am overly excited to look at, they do not mean everything they write all the time. The practice of "over recommending" a student is so replete, that anything less than an awesome letter can be almost a detriment to you. Some hard profs, you know who they are, will be candid and honest about you. Most will be super nice I suspect.

They might dismiss your application without consideration if they deem it incomplete. The bottom line is you need to follow instructions. Whether they would consider you for admission without following instructions properly, none us of can know for sure. I wonder if you can even submit an application with the recommender section left with two people listed only. Schools do not usually let you submit your application unless you have everything filled in. Not having filled in the third slot for the recommendation letter would prevent you from having a complete application, preventing you from sending it anyway. Maybe your application has an override button you can click on each section, such as "mark as complete" that might work. But, this is something you need to think about.

Agreed. You are not bothering anybody by being diligent about correcting unintentional misinformation you provided, it is part of their job to correspond with applicants. The only way you could be annoying is if you sent them a long email, when one sentence would do (as is the case here), and even then it would not be a big deal. Just send them a short email, and be done with it.