I have been wanting to write on this for quite sometime now. But was pretty hooked up with things that I never could manage it. Long ago when I was free I just felt I was not the right person yet. But now, I think I can really talk of it and express my views if not anything else. So this is going to be absolutely my take on the whole process.
I remember days in my second year of college when all these discussions used to happen during our lab sessions.. masters, MBA and more. I knew I wanted to do it. Apply for masters in US but then I was really very clueless about it compared to my other classmates. But still that's what I was going to do though getting into a b-school in India was relatively less complex in terms of the process involved.
Cutting a long story short, the first time I felt insufficient was during my 4th semester hols when some of my classmates who had masters options were doing research projects and I was going to Tata Motors. That I was told would be a negative. I felt very bad. But anyways, TM was a good option and took it up. I had decided that I was going to get into research the next hols. That, believe me, was not at all easy. It being winter not many openings were there. I really wonder how so many people in my college manage to get research projects all the time. I had to struggle. May be because I was not meant for it. Finally, a Prof. accepted me but the field he was working on was nothing related to mine and was not going to be what I want to pursue my higher studies in. CFD and IE are not really close. But I still took it and worked though I did not do a great job of it.
The next issue was GRE. People were preparing like crazy for it when I had not even bought Barrons. I knew I had to do something about it. Thanks to my senior who kind of pushed me through. I finally booked a date and started preparing. Then came my internship. I really could not let it off for I was sure of getting a PPO. Neither did I want to give up GRE. So, I took the internship and postponed my GRE date. I was to prepare all through my hols which never happened. I leave my place for work at about 6 in the morning and come back by 7 at night all so tired. It was a real bad schedule and I really could not study much even when I tried waking up at 4 and sleeping while I commute. I knew Quants was not going to be bad on me but Verbal was not my cup of tea and what I was doing was just adding to it. I had hardly managed to scrape through Barrons word list once when Prof. called me and said he was expecting that I would come back and work. Man!!! He was some great IIT M Prof. and he wants me to come back and work. I really could not say a no whatever the reason be. So I agreed to come and right on the day my internship got over I went to Chennai. Mind you, this was exactly 16 days before my GRE and I had not even completed Barrons list once. To add to this, I had extremely sincere GRE takers for friends who had completed not just Barrons but big book n stuff too more than once when their GRE date was 3 months away!! I really was going to be God-can-only-decide-what. With all this I met some of my friends after coming to Chennai. Effectively about 10days before the day I started taking the few tests I had and the scores were really erratic. With all this, my placement season in college was about to start and I had to register for it. Two days before GRE I was travelling down to register and do the process and get back to Chennai the day before GRE.
Well.. You can imagine how bad a state I was in. I was damn scared and GRE promised me nothing less. I got screwed like I-don't-really-know-to-define-the-extent. I have always been good with Quants and so GRE stuff was no deal. But Verbal was worse than I expected. I knew I was doing the first 5 or 6 questions well when I was baffled by this I-just-can-not-manage 140lines reading comprehension. There I knew I had lost. I somehow managed to push past that but I knew I had messed up. So I was trying really hard to work on the other sessions when I realized I was running out of time. I just started rushing past the questions and had just managed to mark almost every answer when time ended. The questions were so very easy near the end and I knew it was all gone. Still I waited for some miracle without concentrating on the analytical writing that I was doing. Finally at the end of it I click for my scores, only to see a worst nightmare unfolding right there. 800 in Quants yes. But Verbal... I was just doomed.. 510!!!!
There ensued the worst days of my life. What with my parents really wild, everyone around me saying that was the worst score possible and I just can never manage any university anything remotely near top 20. Thanks to my best friend, my only ray of hope. The only person who felt I still would get a good university. After all I had everything else which would work to my advantage. The highest GRE Verbal cut-off, as I remember, to any university that I applied to was 450 and sometimes with a caution that the average of the class is 500. But I had just managed to clear the bare minimum necessity. So, I just went through it. TOEFL was not bad neither was it great. But I did try to do some 2 or 3 listening exercises for I dint want to make a mess again. The only problem in this is the very long duration of the test. Otherwise its very much more easier and comfortable compared to GRE. Though not great I had very much a better score when I think of my GRE. 110 was decent enough for any university. So, that was on the positive side.
So, after the tests start the whole long process of apping to universities. I intend to continue this later. Hmmm.. One last word.. My whole idea of describing in such great details about what happened with my GRE and how I made a mess of it, is just to lay the ground for me to tell at some later point that a bad GRE score does not mean the end of your apping and never to your dreams. So.. Here I stop to continue this later.......
I remember days in my second year of college when all these discussions used to happen during our lab sessions.. masters, MBA and more. I knew I wanted to do it. Apply for masters in US but then I was really very clueless about it compared to my other classmates. But still that's what I was going to do though getting into a b-school in India was relatively less complex in terms of the process involved.
Cutting a long story short, the first time I felt insufficient was during my 4th semester hols when some of my classmates who had masters options were doing research projects and I was going to Tata Motors. That I was told would be a negative. I felt very bad. But anyways, TM was a good option and took it up. I had decided that I was going to get into research the next hols. That, believe me, was not at all easy. It being winter not many openings were there. I really wonder how so many people in my college manage to get research projects all the time. I had to struggle. May be because I was not meant for it. Finally, a Prof. accepted me but the field he was working on was nothing related to mine and was not going to be what I want to pursue my higher studies in. CFD and IE are not really close. But I still took it and worked though I did not do a great job of it.
The next issue was GRE. People were preparing like crazy for it when I had not even bought Barrons. I knew I had to do something about it. Thanks to my senior who kind of pushed me through. I finally booked a date and started preparing. Then came my internship. I really could not let it off for I was sure of getting a PPO. Neither did I want to give up GRE. So, I took the internship and postponed my GRE date. I was to prepare all through my hols which never happened. I leave my place for work at about 6 in the morning and come back by 7 at night all so tired. It was a real bad schedule and I really could not study much even when I tried waking up at 4 and sleeping while I commute. I knew Quants was not going to be bad on me but Verbal was not my cup of tea and what I was doing was just adding to it. I had hardly managed to scrape through Barrons word list once when Prof. called me and said he was expecting that I would come back and work. Man!!! He was some great IIT M Prof. and he wants me to come back and work. I really could not say a no whatever the reason be. So I agreed to come and right on the day my internship got over I went to Chennai. Mind you, this was exactly 16 days before my GRE and I had not even completed Barrons list once. To add to this, I had extremely sincere GRE takers for friends who had completed not just Barrons but big book n stuff too more than once when their GRE date was 3 months away!! I really was going to be God-can-only-decide-what. With all this I met some of my friends after coming to Chennai. Effectively about 10days before the day I started taking the few tests I had and the scores were really erratic. With all this, my placement season in college was about to start and I had to register for it. Two days before GRE I was travelling down to register and do the process and get back to Chennai the day before GRE.
Well.. You can imagine how bad a state I was in. I was damn scared and GRE promised me nothing less. I got screwed like I-don't-really-know-to-define-the-extent. I have always been good with Quants and so GRE stuff was no deal. But Verbal was worse than I expected. I knew I was doing the first 5 or 6 questions well when I was baffled by this I-just-can-not-manage 140lines reading comprehension. There I knew I had lost. I somehow managed to push past that but I knew I had messed up. So I was trying really hard to work on the other sessions when I realized I was running out of time. I just started rushing past the questions and had just managed to mark almost every answer when time ended. The questions were so very easy near the end and I knew it was all gone. Still I waited for some miracle without concentrating on the analytical writing that I was doing. Finally at the end of it I click for my scores, only to see a worst nightmare unfolding right there. 800 in Quants yes. But Verbal... I was just doomed.. 510!!!!
There ensued the worst days of my life. What with my parents really wild, everyone around me saying that was the worst score possible and I just can never manage any university anything remotely near top 20. Thanks to my best friend, my only ray of hope. The only person who felt I still would get a good university. After all I had everything else which would work to my advantage. The highest GRE Verbal cut-off, as I remember, to any university that I applied to was 450 and sometimes with a caution that the average of the class is 500. But I had just managed to clear the bare minimum necessity. So, I just went through it. TOEFL was not bad neither was it great. But I did try to do some 2 or 3 listening exercises for I dint want to make a mess again. The only problem in this is the very long duration of the test. Otherwise its very much more easier and comfortable compared to GRE. Though not great I had very much a better score when I think of my GRE. 110 was decent enough for any university. So, that was on the positive side.
So, after the tests start the whole long process of apping to universities. I intend to continue this later. Hmmm.. One last word.. My whole idea of describing in such great details about what happened with my GRE and how I made a mess of it, is just to lay the ground for me to tell at some later point that a bad GRE score does not mean the end of your apping and never to your dreams. So.. Here I stop to continue this later.......
No comments:
Post a Comment