Application-ing
Warning: This post is a blatant attempt to justify the imminent decline in my postings over the next month and a half.
I am now officially in the thick of the graduate school application process. Some observations:
- While not as stressful, per se, as I thought it was going to be, the busywork involved is much, much more time-consuming. As a digital enthusiast, I’m all for online applications. However, even with using the Quicksilver clipboard to copy and paste common fields, if I have to enter “Pomona College” and “History” into one more text box I’m going to lose it. Cough, need for a common app, cough.
- Many thanks to Jeremy Young for offering up his kind advice for graduate school, and then going ahead and writing a lengthy and quite comprehensive posting at Progressive Historians on the process of applying to graduate schools in history. For a similar, albeit dated, post, see John King and Andrew McMichael’s article at AHA.
- The more and more time I spend dealing with the GRE (test date: October 30th), the more and more I loathe the test and everything it stands for. It costs $140 for the very privilege of taking the test. From there, ETS will send your scores to the first four schools absolutely free (doesn’t this sound like an infomercial?), and at the low, low cost of only $20 a school after that. In all, I’ll be paying a little less than $300 to this company in order to show schools that I remember have no idea what cosine is, know the meaning of recognize the word “consanguinity,” and can write a coherent series of sentences so that a machine grader can read it. I’m not kidding, they have a machine analyze your writing section and compare it to a human grader to maintain fairness. Which is actually kind of cool, I’d love to see the algorithms behind it…
- Finally, since this is quite evidently not a serious posting, The Onion’s Historical Archive last week was amazing.
In conclusion, I will be in blogging semi-hibernation for the near future due to writing personal statements, remembering what cosine is, and anxiously following the most historically monumental presidential election of my young lifetime.
They’ve raised the fees a LOT for the GRE. When I took it three years ago, it cost $110 for the test, and as recently as November 2006, it was $15 for extra scores.
Jeremy Young
October 18, 2008 at 12:33 am
Have you read _A Whole New Mind_ by Daniel Pink? I think it would be really interesting if somebody did a study of the GRE scores of history graduate students and then correlated that with how they later performed in the profession.
Sterling Fluharty
October 30, 2008 at 8:51 pm
I haven’t heard of the book, but it sounds really interesting.
That would be a good study to conduct – my completely uninformed guess is that there is a correlation between professional success in the job market and exemplary GRE scores, and possibly a correlation between lesser career success and significantly lower scores. But for everything in between? I’d venture to say it’s a relatively useless gauge.
Cameron Blevins
October 31, 2008 at 6:24 pm