154V for psych PhD? Advice for international student

[Elliephant]

I took the GRE 3 weeks ago and was reasonably happy with my scores (154V/162Q/5.0AW). Well, I was happy with everything except the verbal score. I'm an international student so I'm aware that my vocab is limited, yet I was hoping for a higher score, esp considering that I went to college for 3.5 years in the US, including one year as an exchange student at a pretty prestigious school. I e-mailed admissions and they told me that faculty understand this and if they were interested in working with me they could easily find out my verbal skills by interviewing me. So I felt comforted and decided not to retake since I'm short of money and have to travel 1.5–2 hours to get to the testing center. Now that deadlines are approaching I am getting very worried that my verbal score might drag me down. I'm applying to some pretty highly ranked social psych PhD programs, including U Oregon, Austin, UC Berkeley. I feel pretty good about the rest of my application (almost perfect TOEFL score, high GPA, B.S. and M.S. in psych, lots of research experience and teaching experience--I even tutored college-level English--and several POIs have expressed interest in me). Should I retake or not? I don't have much time to practice, because my first application deadline is Nov. 21…What if my score doesn't improve? Any advice?

 

/Freaking Out