AFAIK, engineering programs only care about your quant score, and only care about that if you bomb it.

from what i've heard verbal is irrelevant so long as you speak English fluently

lol at english fluency being a requirement for engineering

(maybe it is, but I think there's a loose interpretation of "fluency")

On the flip side, how relevant is the quantitative section for students seeking a MA/PhD in a subject having absolutely nothing to do with math or science (ex: dalerobk with his PhD in Early French History)?

haha, believe me i know it isn't a requirement, just saying that IF you are fluent then your verbal score matters, which is to say i've been told they only consider it for non-native speakers.

I really don't think they consider verbal scores much at all for engineering programs.

One of my foreign friends who doesn't speak all that well said he got at 700 because he studied really hard. I got 580 or something, another foreign friend got 400. Pretty sure admissions know about this and consider the TOFEL score a lot more than verbal GRE when evaluating English fluency. Writing GRE might matter though because you are expected to be able to write clearly for journal articles and all that.

The graduate director where I was going for my PhD in English told me that my 790 on the quantitative was a factor in getting my fellowship, since the department had to report the total GRE score of its fellowship recipients.

Quick question on authorship of a journal article. Is it really relevant which author you are put down for once you get past 2nd? I was just told that I'm getting 4th author (out of 4) for a publication that I did far more work then #3 but he is a professor and I'm just a first year phd student.

While I probably won't make a big deal out of it and won't ruffle any feathers in the long run I'm curious if 3rd versus 4th,5th,6th, etc. is even relevant.

I guess its relevant to some degree, but I'd say after the first two it doesn't really make that big of a difference. I don't think its worth fighting for, I definitely wouldn't tell the professor that you think you should be moved in front of him.

Depends on the field. I had a guy from Biology bragging about being 76th author on a 200+ author paper. Dunno how they got that many authors. In Psychology, 3rd is better than 4th and everyone knows it.

I'm not doubting you, but you may not actually know how much work he did. Most people consider higher-level thinking to be more important than grunt work (running subjects, etc.). He may have helped out a lot more than you know in the design, etc. Either way, you're not going to win that battle.

In Psychology, anything is worthwhile if you're a first year student. Most first years don't have squat. Not sure about your field.

If you're a tenured professor, then any spot is worthwhile because people assume you did more than you did and let your students have higher authorship because they need it more. For an untenured prof at a top 10 school, anything less than 2nd is virtually worthless. At some schools, only first matters to get tenure.

Thanks for the response. I wasn't really planning on fighting hard for this but also don't want to be a pushover my entire time and want to advocate for myself when necessary. Its mainly a moot point with this professor because I am transferring schools but just was curious about the scenario regardless.

Would anyone here be willing to help me proofread and edit my statement of purpose?

submitted my app for Goldwater Scholarship friday, run good one time. it sucks because i need to get nominated by school (engineering school only gets to nominate 2 people) to even have a shot at the actual scholarship. i showed my essay to a few people including one of my TAs and got pretty uniformly positive responses, though its hard to tell how carefully people actually read.

GL (from the Goldwater class of '03-'04 :-p)

out of curiosity, do you remember if you actually put diagrams in your application essay? i saw a few samples online and some had diagrams but it seems like given the 2 page limit they take up a lot of space. for my essay i couldn't think of any ones worth sacrificing that much space so i left them out (just having to cite references alone took up like 1/5 of the space).

jesus, no.

My essay had no references and no diagrams.

i have like 4 references and did the essay in LaTeX which i figure will at least make it look more legitimate, that calms my nerves. i saw some samples and they all had diagrams with experimental results and crap that seemed over th top/waste of space

lol experimental results. math ftw.

yeah, the topic i wrote about was self-organizing robotic systems, basically outlined what would be required to make a simulator for a self-organized robotic mine. i figured it wasn't worth try to draw flow charts/pseudocode because it would take up half a page just to be worthwhile

All grad school apps finally submitted. One time!!!

gl

Doing mine today. Applying to 13 schools, which my dad thinks is too many.

We made a 1k bet on the number I get into with the line at 9.5. I took the under obv.

not too many
under is a good bet unless you are a superstar. too much variance in each decision. 9 acceptances would be a solid win win.

I applied to 4 or 5 reach, 4 target, and 1 safety. got into 0 reach, 3 target, and my safety.

one thing i've wondered, assuming you have the tangibles (grades, test scores, etc.) how do you gauge what is a reach/target? say you are qualified for top 20, are the top 5 or so just inherently reaches unless you have some specific connection to one of those schools?

Ask professors at your school. They know where other students from your school have gone and how you stack up against them.

I went to a small university that sent 1 kid every year or 2 to math grad school. All the test scores in the world weren't making MIT a target school for me