UK Applicant GRE ?'s 170V 161Q 5.5AW

[Charlie13]

Hi all,

I am originally from the US but have been studying in the UK for the past two years and will be applying to US grad schools over the next few weeks. If anyone could help me assess my application, that would be incredible.

I recently took the GRE in London and scored 170V, 161Q, and 5.5 AW. I'm thrilled with my scores as they are much better than either of my practice tests. On my UK transcript I currently have a 73 and 78 for first year and second year, respectively, and those scores are actually fairly strong (approx 4.0 equivalent, maybe bit short?) and I hope US admissions offices will see that.

Given that I am hoping to apply to a number of top ten polsci / policy / computational social science schools in the US, will my slightly lower quant score get in the way? 76 percentile quant is far from the other scores. And PhD versus Masters admissions?

Any perspective would be massively appreciated.

All the best,

Charlie

 

[sargon01]

Hi Charlie, I think you have a competitive GRE score, even for top schools, at least for PoliSci. It is very likely that other competitive applicants will have better quant scores than yours, probably averaging 164-165, but your other scores are superb. You will make the cut and other aspects of your application will be taken into consideration. Work on having a good writing sample (I suggest submitting a complete paper instead of using bits and pieces of different papers) that shows you're capable of coming up with a good research problem, formulating hypotheses and finding ways to test them. Political Science in the US is very quantitative-oriented, so you if you can do something with statistical analysis it might help you. Make sure that in your recommendation letters people mention specific things that you have done. For instance, "Charlie13 worked with me on project X where he was responsible for task Y and did a great job" and "Charlie13 came up with an insightful term paper in course Z, where he analyzed if and to what extend X had an impact on Y... which placed him among the top 5 students in that course" are always much better than "Charlie13 is a great student who asks good questions". The more your professors point out specific things you have done and succeeded, the better it will be for you. If you are close to them, you can point that out. You could also offer to provide them a list of things that you have done with them so that they can write a more precise recommendation letter.

[sargon01]

Additionally, PhD admissions are much more competitive than masters. This is partly because PhD students are a huge investment for departments, while master's programs are usually a ways of making money. As a PhD student you'll get full tuition, health insurance and a stipend. As a master's student, you'll pay to study. However, I believe most schools offer master's scholarships which at least cover tuition costs for the best-ranked students and the opportunity of doing RA and TA work for pay. At least that is how I think it is - you should check with someone who is more familiar with master's here.

[Charlie13]

@sargon01 Thank you for your advice. You've made some points that are very important for me to think about, and I will be discussing with my recommenders about demonstrating quant/stats skills.

Luckily the two professors that have agreed to write a reference for me have seen my polsci quant/research skills in action on social network analysis and nlp applications programming projects. I am hoping their testimony will be more convincing of my quant potential than my GRE score. We will see.

Thanks again.