No more GREs for me

[DrFaustus666]

Hi all,

To all my friends, and anyone else interested, I took the GRE for my third and last time. It seems I can't break the 700 barrier on Quant despite six months' hard study. Hopefully it won't matter.

Just as a matter of interest, my record:

March 2005: V-800 Q-670 AW 5.5 (before beginning my on-again off-again, parttime MA in German Lit, still not finished, over 5-1/2 years later)

Feb 2010: V-740 Q-690 AW 4.5 (after several months' intense quant work, my score only went up 20 points, and my V and AW scores went down)

Today: V-720 Q-640 AW/no idea (after studying, literally every single day since Feb 2010 on quant, my Q-score actually went DOWN 50 points). I conclude that I am quant-challenged and will just have to live with that fact.

Best to all,

John

And green with envy of all of you folks who breeze through the quantitative thing.

[Strangefox]

Oh, your last verbal-quant score is the mirror reflection of mine, which is 720 quant and 640 verbal!

I do not think that in German studies they will care much about quant anyway!

You are going to continue your studies - does it mean that you are reapplying to the same department? Do you need GRE for that?

[newms]

Best of luck John. Your verbal scores are fantastic. I'm not too sure how much emphasis your program places on quant scores so I don't know how it will affect your chances. 690 isn't far away from 700 though, all the best with your applications.

[DrFaustus666]

Best of luck John. Your verbal scores are fantastic. I'm not too sure how much emphasis your program places on quant scores so I don't know how it will affect your chances. 690 isn't far away from 700 though, all the best with your applications.

Thanks! I MAY try one more time, I dunno.

[DrFaustus666]

Oh, your last verbal-quant score is the mirror reflection of mine, which is 720 quant and 640 verbal!

I do not think that in German studies they will care much about quant anyway!

You are going to continue your studies - does it mean that you are reapplying to the same department? Do you need GRE for that?

Actually after the MA in German is done, I want to go back to musicology/music theory; Germanic studies as a discipline is all but dead in the USA. Most universities are cutting back or eliminating Germanic studies; or offering PhDs in G.S. where one reads the works of Kafka, Goethe, Schiller, etc., --- in English.

AND my original love for music is unabated, despite the fact I've not played any music for decades. I still read scores, memorize themes, etc., just for fun. Right now I'm working on all of Mahler's symphonies. By the way, you being from Russia and living in St. Petersburg, did you know that Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov (also from St. Petersburg) was the ONLY major composer ever to write a concerto for my instrument, the trombone? It's a fact. N.R-S, as you probably do know, was an officer in the Tsarist Russian Navy, but became a composer, and a brilliant orchestrator. He taught himself how to play all the instruments of the orchestra. (I see him and Gustave Mahler as being the strongest influences on Shostakovitch, for example.)

Re: My studies: I have an idea for a Ph.D in what might be actually ground-breaking research: I want to try to write a computer model (after 20+ years as a computer programmer) that would read music and perform thematic (pattern recognition) etc. analysis on the music. That's the same stuff that musicologists and music theorists have been doing for centuries, by hand.

The problem is, only a very few universities could fund such exotic research, and my C.S. credentials are not that great (only 30 undergrad credits); therefore I was hoping for a super score in quant, an 800 if possible.

So my fallback plan is to try to write the SOP-to-end-all-SOPs, begin work on the computer model and use that as a research sample, and maybe that would get me into one of the half-dozen or so universities that might fund such an outlandish project.

[Strangefox]

So my fallback plan is to try to write the SOP-to-end-all-SOPs, begin work on the computer model and use that as a research sample, and maybe that would get me into one of the half-dozen or so universities that might fund such an outlandish project.

I am not an expert in musicology, but your research plan sounds very interesting! I am sure that if you explain it well in your SOP and prepare a computer model to show adcomms as a research sample, somebody WILL fund your project.

There are a lot of exotic projects being funded - you just need to present it to universities in an appealing way I don't think that your quant score will pose any problem.

Good luck!!

[DrFaustus666]

Thank you both, newms and StrangeFox ... I hope you're right