Drawers
Now that I have a semester off, I’m deep cleaning the condo ‘cause it’s super gross and dusty and full of all the empty boxes/envelopes from our random online purchases over the past year.
Super fun!
Today’s task was re-organizing a few of my drawers of nonsense. Here’s some fun stuff I found:
Here’s the plaque from the writing award I won in 6th grade. I was going to be given it during our graduation ceremony, but I was too busy GETTING APPENDICITIS so they just gave me this thing afterward.
Here are my abysmal GRE scores from when I was first applying to grad school for psych. That “quantitative” score is so horrible. But I did okay in the “analytical writing” section, though. I remember the two essay topics were things I was super passionate about, so I just went off on them, haha.
More test results! This is from the Iowa Test of Basic Skills that I took in 5th grade. I’m surprised my spelling score was so low; I was a pretty good speller in elementary school. I don’t remember what the “social studies” category actually was testing, but I clearly didn’t know the stuff.
Here are my notes from 2018 when I tried to re-write Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” to apply to the 30 years I’d been alive.
Supa fun!
Ahem.
I am 100% convinced that my shitty GRE scores were the reason that I didn’t get into any US schools for grad school. BUT LOOK WHO HAS TWO MASTERS DEGREES AND IS SUCCESSFULLY TEACHING MATH/STATS AT A UNIVERSITY NOW, HUH?
Sorry, it’s been a decade and I’m still bitter about the fact that the GRE results outweighed everything else that was stellar about my undergrad performance.
And I’m finally going to say that my undergraduate performance was stellar, ‘cause it fucking was.
Fight me, standardized testing.
Also, for anyone else going into STEM who thinks the GRE belongs in the toilet and should not be used as a factor for deciding admission: check here.
Flu shots are BOGUS, I have the immune system of Zeus!
(A “Claudia is hyper” blog follows. You’ve been warned.)
Can you blister your eardrums with hot, hot tunes?
‘CAUSE I THINK I JUST DID!
(That chord at 2:32 makes me super happy. Also, we’re playing this in Concert Band)
I will not be able to hear by the time I’m 30.
[Insert me not giving a crap and cranking the volume higher]
Also, I got all my Amazon stuff at once.
GRE material, Leibniz-related shenanigans, and Metalocalypse.
Yup, sounds about right.
Edit: oh my god, these season 4 extras are great. “It’s a nice night for flying around in a cuuuuuube!”
We Found Dove in a Soapless Place
I want to take the SAT again. Actually, I want to (read: need to) take the GRE again, but before that I want to see how I’d do on the SATs now compared to how I did back when I thought college was dumb and thus didn’t care about some stupid standardized test that required me to sit locked in a room for like five hours on a Saturday back in 2005 (2006?).
Oh my, times change.
And so do the focus topics of these blogs (though this is somewhat related to the SAT): why in the hell don’t some colleges accept students pursuing a second Bachelor’s degrees? Taken directly from the University of Chicago’s “transfer students” page: “Students who already have a Bachelor’s degree are not eligible to apply to the undergraduate College at the University of Chicago as the College does not grant second Bachelor’s degrees.” I have found similarly-worded disclaimers on many college’s transfer students pages. I don’t understand.
It’s not like the students getting their second (or third, or fourth, etc.) degrees aren’t going to, you know, pay the school tuition fees. Seriously! It’s not like having that initial degree somehow exempts them from handing the new school thousands and thousands of dollars.
And what other possible issues could there be to preclude already degreed students from returning to further their education? Are they afraid they’re going to take spots away from first-timers? Is it a credit issue? Are these schools afraid that the returning students are going to whip through the curriculum because their core classes/credits/whatever will have already been taken care of during their first degree? If that’s the case, then I see at least one major flaw with this logic: these schools still accept transfer students who have completed some (most often, at least a year or two) schooling at another university or community college. These students have no “upper limit” on how many credits they have already completed. Hell, they could be one class away from a Bachelor’s degree and still be able to be accepted by the new school.
So if it’s a money thing, what the hell? If it’s a credit thing, what the hell? Unless I’m just being dense (which is a real possibility) and missing something major, I really don’t understand why schools don’t let those who have already completed degrees get another degree.
Blarfhslkfsgaherlasfalaksdeegfartfart.
I want more undergrad, dammit!
Are you serious?
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 14th 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.
+900 in Negative Karma!
Good thing to know: waking up 5 minutes before you’re scheduled to take the GRE leads to super crappy GRE scores.
Fuck this, I don’t want to talk about it.
Who’s ready for the GRE?!
Well I’m sure as heck not. That’s why I bought some flashcards and such today. Luckily, you can take it five times in a twelve-month span, so I think I’ll be okay.
Goal score: 1400+
Plus I have to take the subject test on psychology. Well, I don’t have to, but the colleges I want to go to recommend it. Crap.
Eigenblogger 