Devastated by my GRE score. Is there any hope for me?

[crazypoligirl]

Yea me too. I felt the same way about preserving my voice. With so many hands in the pot, it is so easy for that voice to get muffled. In the end I just stuck with the one prof that knew me best. Luckily I also have a good friend who is an editor, so she helped me proof. Seriously, I found out so much more than I ever wanted to know about commas...

[Minnesotan]

I worked for five years as an editor, and my gf taught grammar to non-native speakers, so we go at it every once in a while about our mutual editing jobs. It's cute, in a highly nerdy sort of way. Anyhoo, your comma comment reminded me of an argument we had yesterday about the British/Canadian tendency to place unnecessary commas after prepositional phrases - she "allowed me to win," which is her clever way of saying I'm right, without ever letting those exact words escape her lips. Women! =)

I know my Statement was clean and crisp, but I'm not sure if the content is what everyone wanted. We'll have to wait and see. I certainly worked hard enough on the things to satisfy my inner perfectionist.

[amanda1655]

I have learned that I will never satisfy my inner perfectionist. I just worked my SOP over and over again until I was exhausted. Eventually, I realized there was nothing more I could do.

On a side note, I too was advised to focus on the specifics of what I wanted to study in graduate school, but when I wrote it, I ended up putting in a bit of background information. The professor who read the section said that he loved it and felt that I should keep that section and just edit it down, despite his original counsel. What followed was over a month of trying to balance the two sections so that I had enough personal background information to make my SOP interesting AND enough information about my interests and potential topics.

I just hope it was good enough to get me in somewhere with funding.

[scirefaciat]

I agonized over my SOP, put it off and put it off until I literally could not procrastinate anymore. When all was said and done, I think I did a mix of research and personal style, and everyone I've shown it to has liked it. To be fair, none of these people were professors.

I basically laid out my methodology, the way I approach history, and how my previous -- very interdisciplinary -- educational experience has shaped both the way I research and how I perceive my subjects. I also mentioned a specific professor and how her work meshed with my research, but I think I also made it clear that I had a wide range of research areas and my interest in the program did not begin and end with her.

I tried to give it a conversational tone, but still professional, as if I was talking to them myself, rather than trying to write a really spiffy sounding letter. Is this the way to go? I have no idea, but that letter was definitely me.

[NO8DO]

sounds good to me! haha

interdisciplinary is my middle name

[dmh26]

I got in somewhere! To all those with horrible GRE scores, there is hope! lol

[Historylover]

If it makes anyone feel better, the GREs only have a .2 correlation of predicting success in grad school, which is a very weak positive correlation. A perfect correlation is a 1 for non-math people. I would personally rather pay an extra whatever to take a measure devised by my choice schools as knowledge that I should have before entering the program than pay $150 for a test that doesn't really show anything and is an arbitrary cut used by most grad schools to weed out applicants. I don't disagree about the need for a standard measure to take into account what an A means in school 1 vs school 2, but I do disagree with how the GREs are used currently and what it actually measures.