Low GRE Verbal - Will I still be competitive at top CS M.S. programs?

[wirru]

Just took the GRE at 8AM this morning and bombed the Verbal section -- I ended up getting 460 V and 780 Q. For the Verbal section, I was averaging around 580 on practice exams; I must have made some serious mistakes at the beginning of the test for my score to drop so drastically. I am a native speaker, born in California. Prior to this morning, I had hoped to be competitive at the top Computer Science M.S programs (Stanford, CMU, etc.), but now I am extremely worried... Will my low verbal score ruin my chances of being accepted into these programs?

My stats are as follows:

Undergrad School: UCLA

Major: Electrical Engineering w/ emphasis in Computer Engineering (EECE)

Cumulative GPA: 3.765

Upper-Division GPA: 3.8x (don't remember off the top of my head)

GRE: 460V 780Q (still waiting on AW score)

Research Experience / Publications:

I started research with a very well-known CS professor last year, and got a publication as first author within the first 10 weeks (I worked extremely hard because I wanted to make up for the years I didn't do any research). Will continue research with this professor for my remaining 2 quarters at UCLA, and anticipate getting more publications.

Internships:

2 summers as IT at a venture funded software startup

2 summers as software engineer at Cisco

I've tried to compensate for the fact that I am primarily an EE major by focusing my outside efforts (research, internships) on CS. Can anyone please provide thoughts? Do I really need to retake the GRE?

[newms]

Your verbal GRE isn't too low to kill your chances. Remember that the verbal GRE is not very important at all for CS admissions committees. What will be much more important will be your research experience, your SoP and your letters of recommendation - especially from the well-known prof.

You could re-do the GRE to ease your nerves (especially since I'm guessing that you would probably do better on both the verbal and quant sections) but I think it would be unnecessary. Other than the lowish verbal GRE (which is really not that important at all) I think you have a pretty competitive profile for MS programs. Good luck!

[wirru]

Well, I just checked online and saw that I received a 5.0 on the AW section.

So in summary, my GRE score was:

460 Verbal

780 Quant

5.0 AW

I know that admissions people don't usually care about the AW section, but I'm hoping that my relatively high AW score can offset my low Verbal score, at least by a little. At this point, summer is coming to a close, and I haven't made any plans to retake the GRE. Hopefully I don't end up regretting this...