So, yes, I’m doing pretty well in the job market, and, yes, I’m lucky to be out there job-hunting in 2005 rather than any of the few years prior to 2005. But that doesn’t seem to stop me from having the same Peter Pan dream of many of my sixteenth-grade peers: attending graduate school. Like Never Never Land, grad school allows men and women to escape the reality of being all grown up. These people should probably be diving into corporate America, but instead opt to continue their hedonistic college lifestyles of The Price is Right hangovers as Master’s or PhD candidates. But before they can become such Lost Boys of further education, they must pass one of the grueling gauntlets of standardized tests: for law school, the LSAT; for business school, the GMAT; for med school, the MCAT; and for the rest of us, the GRE.
The GRE, yielding no such convenient articulation as the names of the other tests, is simply called the “Jee-Are-Ee”. Like the military’s MRE (”Emm-Are-Ee”) field rations, the GRE is bland, monotonous, and always leaves one’s mouth with a distinct flavor. It is a computer-based four-hour test, and does not allow the student to skip forward in the test or to refer back to previous problems. It is a cleverly adaptive little test, meaning it decides which questions to ask based on the positive or negative results of precursory questions. The major advantage of electronic testing is that the results are instantaneous. No longer must one spend four to six weeks nervously awaiting their snail-mailed results. (Note that the written section — two analytical essays shot from the hip, one in 30 minutes and another in 45 minutes — still requires human graders, so students must wait for these scores in the mail.)
I’m not sure why I took the GRE if not to apply to graduate school. One candidate motive is my sick love for standardized testing. Adrenaline always accompanies these tests, and adrenaline is one stimulant strong enough to balance any attention deficit. But why pay for an adrenaline rush when I could just sit down for a ten-hour session of competitive online games? No, I certainly intended to apply to graduate school, probably in engineering or computer science. Intended. But now that I’m anticipating a handful of full-time job offers, some from companies that are known to pay for Master’s degrees, I find myself inching toward the workforce every day.
When my scores appeared on the computer screen at the testing center last week, I was certainly delighted to find that I’d aced the quantitative section and done adequately on the verbal. While I’m of course excited at the thought of another two years of Bacchan revelry, I can hardly justify digging my debts deeper just yet. Maybe I will return to school once someone else is willing to pay for it.
Update 11/8/2005: Sweet. I just received my scores from the written section: 6.0/6.0! If the job search keeps on dryfiring, I may just pack up my GRE and stay in school after all.
Update 4/2/2007: I didn't go to grad school, and still haven't. I'm happily working at Google and living up in San Francisco, in the Mission.
