GOD DAMMIT. AGAIN.

The company that I have to get into and through graduate school to work for is the very company whose test will probably be reason schools will turn me down. If it didn’t suck so horribly, I’d be laughing at the irony.

I’ve done an average of 26.6 credits per semester, with a couple of those done over the summer. I have a 4.0. I’m graduating in 37 days with my psychology degree. I have almost enough statistics background for a minor and almost enough philosophy background for a major, both of which I’m getting next semester. I have research experience. I’m co-author of an article that’s under review for publication. I have worked my ass off for the past year and a half, cramming eight semester’s worth of work into five. Why? Because I am so ready to go into the career I want that I’m willing to sacrifice everything—down time, time to hang out with friends, non-school related extracurricular activities, even my sanity (flashbacks to last semester’s finals week)—to get to a point where they’ll finally let me to the job I want to do so badly.
So what will my GRE scores tell the grad schools to which I’m applying?

They’ll tell them that I don’t know what 9 raised to the 14^th power is (this was an actual question. Seriously. What is the practicality of knowing this??).

They’ll tell them that I can’t find an antonym of the word “panegyric” given a list of five words.

They’ll tell them that I can’t remember the formula for the area of a cylinder.

But you know what it won’t tell them?

That standardized tests have never once predicted my performance in academia (with my SAT scores, my undergrad GPA should apparently be about a 2.6).

That I understand statistics and enjoy them.

That I have such a passion for psychometrics that it’s all I can ever see myself doing with my life.

That I am probably the most motivated person they’ll ever meet.

It’s just very, very depressing to think of the fact that regardless of all this hard work I’ve put into my education, regardless of the stress, regardless of how desperately I want to be a psychometrician and carry out what I think is my life calling, no school will give me a second glance because I cannot perform well on a standardized test.

Fuck it.