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No, not an election postmortem \u2014 I don\u2019t believe there is appropriate data that could help identify whether, for instance, droves of Republicans really did stay home by getting suckered into the belief that this somehow made sense as a way of fighting against lizard people, at least not at this point in time.\u00a0 A GRE postmortem because one of my projects over the past month has been applying to graduate school.<\/p>\n
Yes, again.<\/p>\n
Readers who pay careful attention will know that I was in a Ph.D. program in medieval history immediately after graduating college.\u00a0 In fact, it is one of the great ironies of my life decisions that I was a \u201cMadison major\u201d in college, that is, a public policy major at the James Madison College at Michigan State.\u00a0 I started taking history courses and added that as a double-major but, as it happened, one of the requirements for the Madison College program was spending an academic term at an internship, and I wasn\u2019t happy about having to either forgo a quarter (they were on quarters then) of regular classes or pay the added expenses of a summer internship (as one needed to pay 15 credits of tuition, in addition to self-funding living expenses, as internships were generally unpaid).\u00a0 Now, I had very little idea of what I could do for a living as a newly minted public policy graduate \u2014 friends who had graduated before me seemed to be going to law school or business school after, neither of which I was interested in \u2014 but the path forward as a history major seemed pretty clear:\u00a0 get a Ph.D. and teach at a university.\u00a0 Heck, my (history) advisor was even sharing information about fellowships, which had statements along the lines of \u201cwe need to prepare new Ph.D.s because there will be a wave of retirements from the prior wave of new hires for professors hired to teach the Baby Boomers.\u201d\u00a0 And at any rate the path to a Ph.D. was eased by free tuition and a stipend.<\/p>\n
So I dropped the Madison major and shifted my intentions.\u00a0 Would it have made a difference if I had had a greater knowledge of options available?\u00a0 Dunno.\u00a0 (And yes, I met my husband while in grad school and we\u2019re happily married but \u2014 sorry, honey \u2014 I don\u2019t believe that we all have a single \u201csoulmate\u201d; our lives would have taken different paths had we not met but I don\u2019t believe that one can say that we each wouldn\u2019t have found some other spouse and have had similarly satisfactory lives.\u00a0 And, yes, just the other day a Bloomberg columnist shared on twitter a graph<\/a> that suggests that my undergrad years were actually a brief period of labor shortage in academia, in history at least, so my advisors weren\u2019t making this up out of whole cloth.)<\/p>\n But now, having left grad school and the highly uncertain job prospects even if I\u2019d gotten that Ph.D., and having spent 20 years working as an actuary instead, and trying to find my way in something more freelancer-y, I am realizing that there are a number of topics in the area of retirement research where I want to be the one proposing answers rather than just sharing information others have provided.\u00a0 Or, rather, I want my proposals to be backed by research rather than just \u201cthis seems right to me.\u201d\u00a0 And that means an economics Ph.D., even though I will have to work hard to make it be the kind of economics study that I am interested in at a time when my working understanding of the field is that economists in academic have shifted the emphasis of the field over the past several decades to a heavy emphasis on theory and very high level math.\u00a0 My periodic checks on the new working papers at the National Bureau of Economic Research<\/a> suggests that the field has even come to define the practice of \u201ceconomics\u201d as \u201cthe use of data sets and statistical analysis to draw conclusions\u201d rather than having anything to do with the economy; for instance, new this week in the working papers are \u201cPolitical Parties as Drivers of U.S. Polarization: 1927-2018<\/a>\u201d and \u201cHistory\u2019s Masters: The Effect of European Monarchs on State Performance<\/a>,\u201d which is about the consequences of inbreeding.\u00a0 And something wonky that I only learned in looking into Ph.D. programs is that economics students don\u2019t write dissertations as I know them or tried to write 25 years ago, as a book-length research project, but instead combine three papers into a volume they call \u201cEssays in [Name of Subfield].\u201d<\/p>\n But nonetheless, I decided that it was quite possibly the right next step \u2014 and, after all, the time was right, as my youngest is headed into high school next fall.\u00a0 At the same time, there were only two economics programs to which I could realistically apply, having no plans to relocate, one at the state school in the city, and the other, at the suburban private college that\u2019s a reasonable commute \u2014 though the latter was\/is something of a long shot in terms of their selectivity.\u00a0 Really I don\u2019t know if either of them will give me an honest consideration as there\u2019s a big difference between saying, \u201cage discrimination is wrong\u201d and actually putting that into practice in your own acceptance procedures, and its a very easy thing to say, \u201cwe\u2019re not discriminating on the basis of age, we\u2019re just discriminating on the basis of how very long ago it was that she had academic coursework,\u201d because it is my understanding that this is one of the excuses employers have, that is, that they are following the letter of the law so long as they give equal consideration to a 50 year old and a 25 year old, each of whom has just graduated college.<\/p>\n So I put together applications.\u00a0 I requested transcripts.\u00a0 I wrote a Personal Statement.\u00a0 I requested letters of recommendation (yes, that\u2019s another iffy one; no professors to write glowingly about my academic skill as in my first round).\u00a0 I even dug through old papers to find my original GRE scores from 30 years ago.\u00a0 And then I signed up for the GRE and checked a book out from the library to study for it, making a few notes on some forgotten geometry (30-60-90 triangles, anyone?).<\/p>\n Now, I learned quickly that \u201cthis is not your father\u2019s GRE.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1991, there were three sections, Verbal, Quantitative, and Analytical; the last of these was, I believe logic-type questions and it must have played to my abilities because my score was an 800 vs. a 730\/97th percentile for Verbal and a 770\/93rd for Quantitative.<\/p>\n Now the Analytical section is gone instead there\u2019s a writing section, with two half-hour essays that are supposed to emphasize your analytical skill as well as overall writing abilities.<\/p>\n And not only is the whole thing computer-based (not a surprise) but it offers the ability to take it at home with online proctoring that involves webcam access.\u00a0 The online proctoring system isn\u2019t perfect \u2014 each of the two times I took it (I\u2019ll get to that) there were system hiccups in which, the first time, it kept defaulting to an external webcam that no longer existed, and the second time, it couldn\u2019t connect to the integrated webcam but kept defaulting to it even after I had connected an external webcam \u2014 in both cases meaning that I didn\u2019t start taking the exam until 45 minutes or more past the official start time.<\/p>\n But beyond that, the online proctoring requires that one use a whiteboard rather than scratch paper, and I was wholly unprepared for this.\u00a0 Honestly, even reading the information when signing up for the second time (again, more on this in a few paragraphs) I did not see anything saying, \u201cyou must use a whiteboard.\u201d\u00a0 As it happened, when the proctor said, \u201cno you can\u2019t have scratch paper, only a whiteboard,\u201d I was taking the exam in my son\u2019s bedroom at his desk as the most suitable spot in the house, so I yanked the whiteboard off his wall and used the dry erase marker that was sitting there, but it was a bear trying to take a math exam using this, especially without having prepared for it.<\/p>\n The outcome:\u00a0 a 168 on the verbal, a 160 on the math, and a 5.0 on the writing.<\/p>\n Yes, you\u2019d think I\u2019d have done better on the writing, but I admit that I didn\u2019t do a lot of prep for it, and I think that had I dug into it more, I\u2019d have found more prep around writing to the rubric.\u00a0 Some sample essays I found later seem to suggest, without explicitly saying so, that being verbose (wordy) is a boost, and leave me wondering whether one element in the rubric is a simple word count.<\/p>\n The verbal?\u00a0 Well, I can\u2019t complain about that score, to be sure.\u00a0 It is striking to me that it\u2019s supposed to measure knowledge of vocabulary in context as well as logical reasoning, interpretation of text, comprehension, etc., but my sense was that it also measures knowledge of the American social environment, culture, politics, and history, in being able to place items in context.\u00a0 Two standard types of questions are a multi-part fill-in-the-blank and a fill-in-the-blank with pairs of synonyms, and both of these were as much about \u201cwhat do I know to be the right answer based on my knowledge of the world around me?\u201d as \u201cwhat words fit based on my knowledge of English-language vocabulary?\u201d which left me feeling that my ability to do well on this section was boosted by my having lived 30 years of an adult life outside of college, having read widely, etc. \u2014 though, at the same time, the percentile score of that GRE was not meaningfully different than the prior one.<\/p>\n But the math?\u00a0 Yeah, not good, and it\u2019s especially important to have a high math GRE score for the long-shot program I applied to, but also useful for getting funding for the state-school one.\u00a0 And what\u2019s a particular nuisance is that this is not hard math.\u00a0 My sense is that the SAT\u2019s math is actually harder; in the GRE there are a few extra topics (they toss in a question about standard deviation periodically, for example) but they also have a number of questions that are fundamentally about logical reasoning, both in terms of reasoning through questions with inequalities or absolute values, and through questions which are structured to trip one up with unexpected tricks or which require thinking through patterns, etc.<\/p>\n So I signed up for another test, to be taken just a few days after the 21-day delay restriction expired, and also timed to be just after the kids went back to school.\u00a0 I found out that my youngest son had a letter-paper-sized whiteboard from school which was much easier to work with, and I purchased a set of ultra-fine dry-erase pens, and I worked out sample problems on areas I was weak with or, rather, could solve, but not quickly enough, and simply took a bunch of practice tests.\u00a0 I was able to get to a point where I was finishing with enough time to spare to check my work, and was able to work through the problems on that single side of the whiteboard so that I could refer back to do that checking.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t quite get the math score up as high as I wanted it to be \u2014 no matter what, I would end up with a couple mistakes \u2014 but I hoped that my prior history with doing well on tests would mean that in the testing environment I would be able to push myself to find those mistakes.<\/p>\n Alas, it was not to be.\u00a0 Or, rather, I boosted my verbal score up to a 170, but that just didn\u2019t matter.\u00a0 My math score was what mattered, and I only increased that by 3 points, not high enough, based on the preliminary scoring, because the second section (which is, in the nature of how the exam works, harder than the first) included a few problems of a type I hadn\u2019t seen before, which threw me off, and I struggled to complete the exam and guessed on a few rather than finishing in time to go back and solve.\u00a0 If somehow it was possible to use some of the time on the verbal section that I didn\u2019t need, to shift over to the quantitative, or even to use the leftover time from the first quantitative, on the second, it would have helped.\u00a0 And whether it was just bad luck that there was a set of problems that I was blanking on, or whether I just don\u2019t have the mental flexibility any longer to adapt to different but entirely solveable problems, I don\u2019t know.\u00a0 It might even be that in a different context than three hours into a computer-based exam (preceded by some truly-stressful system set-up), I would not have perceived of these as difficult problems at all (one of them I worked out in the middle of the next verbal section and it was a simple matter of finding and applying a pattern).\u00a0 But it\u2019s frustrating as heck that a section of an exam that requires solving simply but \u201ctrick\u201d math problems quickly has a good chance of being a roadblock to a Ph.D. program.<\/p>\n As a side note, I am also curious as to how the increasing numbers of foreign students taking the GRE has affected the scores over time.\u00a0 The Verbal 730 I got 30 years ago, according to a conversion scale published by the GRE<\/a>, would convert to a 168 now, or a 98th percentile, which is funny in that, yes, I said just a few paragraphs prior that I had the sense that 30 years of adult-lifetime reading boosted my score above what it otherwise would have been.\u00a0 The 770 in math in 1991 would have converted to a 161 or an 80th percentile.\u00a0 According to more recent percentile rankings, however, it takes a 163 to get to an 80th percentile \u2014 but in 2016 that same 163 would have merited an 84th percentile<\/a>.\u00a0 Does this mean anything?\u00a0 I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n And, in any case, I really don\u2019t know how much credence the admissions folk will give to my FSA credential.\u00a0 Will they see it as evidence of ability to do hard math?\u00a0 Will they be impressed at the self-study it requires?\u00a0 Or will it be unfamiliar enough to them that they won\u2019t have any kind of a sense of the significance.<\/p>\n So that\u2019s my ramble, as much about making myself feel better and trying to do a sort of processing that I find sometimes helps to move beyond a disappointing event, as it is about trying to get the Big Pageview Counts.<\/p>\n How\u2019s your new year going?<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" No, not an election postmortem \u2014 I don\u2019t believe there is appropriate data that could help identify whether, for instance, droves of Republicans really did stay home by getting suckered into the belief that this somehow made sense as a way of fighting against lizard people, at least not at this point in time.\u00a0 A […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[939],"class_list":["post-17794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-personal"],"yoast_head":"\n