Everything you wanted to know about the GRE, but were too afraid to ask!

Ok, the title may sound a little overboard, but you get my point. I will try to discuss whatever I can about the GRE.

Scheduling an appointment:
If you have made up your mind and are all set to leave for an MS in Fall 06, you should have taken your GRE & Toefl tests by now. If you plan to leave later, and if you haven't yet taken the tests, you can always go ahead and book your dates on the ETS website. If you have just started exploring the MS option, then you can read-up about GRE in here .

Re-scheduling or cancelling an appointment:
What if you take a GRE date and then realise "Omg, omg I am not prepared, I got 800 in the Powerprep CD. Both sections combined!". You do have the chance to postpone or cancel your appointment, by payment of a fee of USD 40, 7 calendar-days before your appointment. Its worth doing away with 40 dollars and buying yourself time. A poor GRE score will not only scar you for the rest of your life, you may also miss that admit because you had an 800-score!

How difficult is the GRE?
The GRE isn't all that bad or monstrous as you thought it would be. Infact a few people are of the opinion that GRE is a quite a simple test. The Maths section simply tests you on high-school math. A few months with the word-list should make you start using all those cool-sounding words on your unsuspecting friends and make them go huh!? Be a little wary of people suddenly having that i-am-busy-look on their faces as you walk past them, lest you catch hold of them to practice your new vocabulary!

Preparing for the GRE
A lot of people join coaching-classes for the GRE. If you have some extra money, you can sure join a coaching class! But its not really required. You can buy the material and study everything yourself. A Barron's GRE book is good for the word list. In case you are a flash-card person, those are available too! You can practice a whole lot of CDs namely, Kaplan, Barrons, Princeton, BIG CD and many more! However, the Power=prep cd is the most important of them all. It is the single best indicator of your final score! Take it atleast 10 days prior to your test-date, so that you can post-pone your appointment if the need arises.

On the test-day!
Chances are that you will have a sleepless night. Do not do this. You need that sleep, don't deprive brain of its resting time. A well rested mind is better equipped to tackle the GRE than a groggy mind. Do not rush into last minute preparations even if they are super-important. Do not try learning new words or formuale. Cramming won't work at all. Don't drink excess water. Lot of water coupled with coffee and air-conditoned rooms does wonders to the human bladder. Go to the testing center a day in advance to simply check it out. Imagine being lost on your GRE date! The testing centers are all white, futuristic and clean! You might feel quite intimidated if you haven't been there before. Take a friend along to drop you till the test center. Moral support works wonders.Carry your confirmation number, passport and second identification with you. Carry some water in case you get too thirsty and carry a nice warm sweater! Ask any senior for gre-advise, you get it free of cost! But the problem is once they start, they just don't stop!!

Whats a good-score?
If you ask me this question I might just say nothing for a whole minute. This is because nobody could ever tell you what a good score is. It is difficult question because the satisfaction levels of people vary. Some maybe happy with an 1100 score, while a 1550 scorer may cry her eyes out because she missed those 50 marks. Try being happy with your score whatever it is. You gave it your best!

Whats the secret to a good-score?
Since you didn't seem to get my good score talk, you can access the one and only secret website to get a good score here. Fooled you, there was no link there! And unlike the coaching classes, I didn't even charge you for it. OK now seriously, here's the secret formula Does this work everytime with you?

I hate to sound like your mom here, but hardwork is the only secret formula here! Don't save this formula for one day before the GRE. Hardwork and time. Put that effort in, you'll see it paying off in a great score.

So long and so forth. Will keep you updated :-)

What's to stop India and China?

These days, nothing fascinates me more than the potential that India and China carry to dominate the world economy and political landscape in the years to come. The Economist magazine published this article that is a very good reading for those interseted where these two jiants are heading to.

India and China
What's to stop India and China?
Oct 27th 2005From The Economist print edition
Economist Magazine

India and China could grow even faster but for their political timidity
FOR the past two years and, according to projections, this year and next as well, the Indian economy has managed to grow at around 7% or better. That allows optimistic souls, in London, New York and Tokyo as well as in Delhi and Bangalore, to hope that India might now be on the verge of repeating China's awesome transformation. By averaging annual growth of 9.5% for almost three decades, China has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty in the most rapid and far-reaching economic transformation in history.
Such talk, alas, is just that: optimistic. Even India's prime minister, the courteous and intellectual Manmohan Singh, admits as much. He admires China's discipline in driving through big infrastructure projects and economic reforms, he says; but notes (with diplomatic phrasing), that China is “more focused than India, as a democracy, can afford to be.” It is, he reckons, a price worth paying; he has no desire to see India change its political system.

Yet just at the moment, democracy is proving far from helpful to Mr Singh as he struggles to move India's economic reforms on to the next stage. In the early 1990s, then serving as finance minister, he became every economist's darling by introducing measures that set India back on the path to growth. Tariffs were slashed, exchange controls scrapped, the “licence raj” that strangled business in red tape largely abolished. In retrospect, that was the easy bit.
The reforms of the 1990s required vision, but tended to benefit everyone and harm no one. What India needs now is a raft of supply-side reforms that will, in the short term at least, hurt powerful interests. These are principally the trade unions which, through their control of the Communist parties that in turn prop up Mr Singh's minority government, are able to hold him to ransom. As we report (see article), the Communists have more or less brought Mr Singh's reforms to a halt. He has been unable to continue the task of privatising the plethora of inefficient state-owned businesses. He has found it almost impossible to ease the system of caps that limit foreign direct investment in many big sectors, notably retailing. And labour market reform is not even being discussed.

It is not fair to blame Mr Singh for all of this, though he might have tried harder. He is in office but not in power. Although he is prime minister, it is Sonia Gandhi, the president of the Congress party, who takes the big decisions. Under her rule, the party has reverted to its traditional stance; left-leaning and not very interested in reform. For its part, the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which was once truly reformist, has lapsed into internecine and perhaps terminal bickering about the virtues of Hindu fundamentalism.

The gloom should not be overstated: India today has a dynamism that has never been there before: witness the incredible growth of outsourcing companies, now doing legal and medical work for clients around the world, not just running their call-centres. The momentum from the earlier reforms continues, and despite his difficulties Mr Singh has been able to introduce a national rate of value-added tax, and pioneering public-private partnerships for road building. It probably is the case that the earlier reforms focused too much on the affluent city-dwellers at the expense of the rural poor—who voted the BJP out of office last year—so a period of consolidation may be no bad thing. Sooner or later, though, India will have to tackle its remaining rigidities. The fate of Mr Singh, increasingly these days seen as someone to be pitied rather than admired, is a reminder of just how powerfully politics can constrain economics.

So too in China. That is so in India, perhaps, but surely not in China, which may lack the benefits of democracy, but is at least free of its pitfalls? Only up to a point. China is clearly not a democracy in the sense of having an elected leadership or multiple political parties, but that is not the same thing as saying that its people have no power. The really interesting thing about the presidency of Hu Jintao, who completed the drawn-out business of assuming power only a year ago, is just how nervous he appears to be about popular discontent, and the lengths to which he is going to appease it.

China officially saw no fewer than 74,000 riots and demonstrations last year—some small and peaceful, but many large and a number even violent. Just like Mr Singh in India, Mr Hu is consequently being forced to concentrate much harder on the rural poor than on the coastal cities. Cleaning up corrupt and abusive government is one priority for him, reducing the burden of tax on the countryside another. Tackling pollution, which invariably hurts the poor more than the affluent, has become a third.

As in India, this renewed concern about discontent among those left behind by progress is tempering liberalisation. This is most obvious in the area of the Chinese economy which needs it most: the banking sector. As we report (see article), the Chinese government clearly recognises that its banks are under-capitalised and insufficiently profitable, and it has taken some impressive steps to correct these problems with determined efforts to recapitalise the weak and clear up at least part of what used to be a mountain of bad debt.

But it has not been anything like brave enough. The government has not addressed the root cause: the big banks remain, ultimately, under the control of the government and not the rules of commerce, which is why foreign investment—which would improve efficiency by opening banking to lots more competition—remains restricted, just as it is in India. As long as this is so, the pressure to allocate credit on the basis of political patronage rather than market efficiency will persist. Fearful of ceding too many levers of control to the private sector, let alone foreigners, China's nervous leaders are still shying away from the toughest decisions. The method of getting rid of a government that is seen to be failing its masses might be different—revolution in China, the ballot box in India. But the world's largest autocracy and its largest democracy have more in common than one might think.

Fall(ing) 2005

yea folks...it's starting to happen. The happy, carefree, beer guzzling days of early Fall are starting to fall apart. Instead homework, projects, staring endlessly at the stupid 17 inch monitor to google stuff and freaky weather have started to take over. Am just about making ends meet with homework and the project....have 2 homeworks and a 'master' project all due by mid-week next. So, suddenly, staying indoors has become a norm. Well, that's one part of grad life that's always gonna kill ye(or reaaally please ye), but i guess it's better to enjoy the situation than bitch about it. Afterall it's this one week. Also not to forget the exam week. Infact two of them...midterm and the finals. So, 2 weeks of exams, another couple to workout the coursework....decent count for one quarter. leaves me with almost two months to enjoy time (read as laze around, not study and spend time outdoors). Well that doesn't hold good for people who are working on their thesis though. I've already seen some guys around me spending hours in the lab trying to figure out how the freakin' centrocuriooscispectelloscope works, or maybe modeling some obscure, infinitely long, super complex control law on their DELLs.

So, it's actually a matter of attitude....yeah true that studies is the so-called 'sole purpose' of this journey....but don't forget...If you don't enjoy it, no point doing it !!

-Oz

Starting on the right foot.

Congratulations! The very fact that you are here right now, and not at a counsellors office, watching the admits at Nebraska he's managed to get his past students, proves that you have started on the right foot indeed.

The GRE & the TOEFL are simply minor hurdles in the application process. As long as you study well, practice enough and sleep well before the test, you can be assured of a good score. A good score is a very relative term, like we shall discover in the consequent posts about GRE. So like I was telling you, what you should concentrate whole heartedly on after your entrance exams is your school shortlisiting procedure.

Shortlisting schools is a very personal thing, almost like buying underwear. You have to go there, choose it yourself, or you might land up with a bad fit and an ill-fitting-underwear walk. I am sure you must have seen plenty of people doing the ill-fitting-underwear walk and laughed at them, and must have at some point of time suffered from the same too. Many might see this analogy in bad taste, but thats exactly what shortlisiting schools is like.

Now would you ask your counsellor to buy underwear shortlist schools for you? There are several things you may need to consider but your counsellor might ignore. You maybe intolerant to cold, as I am. You may have siblings in the US, and might want to be at a car-drive of 4 hours away from them, or you may want to look at schools on the west coast to escape a nagging aunt on the east coast, you may have dreamt about living in a beautiful snow covered locale, you may have a boyfriend in a state and want to be close to him. These were the non academic factors. Strictly non academic.

There are a lot of academic factors which need consideration too. Mostly your specialisation. A lot of us have specific specialisations in mind before our MS. You might want to look at schools which offer a lot of courses in Digital VLSI. Or something specific like parallel and distributed computing. Chances are your counsellor maybe as blank and ignorant as you are about the life cycle of a Pawsonia Saxicola. Would you trust him to shortlist schools for you? I am quite sure I wouldn't.

Another factor you would want to consider is the post-ms-scenario. If you did your Masters from Haryana University in Parallel and Distributed Computing, chances are that you maybe unemployed after your masters too. But if you were in Bangalore, it would be a different story altogther. I am not saying that Haryana University is not good, nor am I saying that companies in Bangalore would recruit students from Bangalore only. Just that they stand a better chance, a much betetr chance of working with Wipro or TI simply because they have the advantage of being locals.

If you have enrolled at a counsellor already for over 10 grand, I am sorry. You could have built yourself a great wardrobe, or you could have bought that display card and kicked ass in Quake 2. But do not make this second error of trusting your counsellor entirely. Think intelligently, do your homework and then start your applications.

Edulix is a great place to start your research work. Go through people's posts, read them patiently and carefully. Search before you ask. Chances are that somebody has had the same doubts as you before.

To cut my long post short, applying for MS is not as difficult or as intimidating as it seems. Its a long journey, but at the end of it, it pays off I suppose.

Will keep you updated, as always :-)

Tran-scripts !!

Not so long ago i remember me running around my uni trying to get my transcripts done. and for a long long time, i really didn't know what one looked like. In India, most of us have had that problem due to the complex university structure. A shade lucky for those of us who have or are stydying in colleges termed as 'deemed unis'.

When a uni here asks for your transcript what they ideally want is a list of condensed grades or marks of all the semesters summed up into one sheet. You might have noticed a mention of the term 'official' transcript. that means a condensed list of your subjects, grades/marks, total gpa/%age on an official letterhead of ur college signed and sealed for by an authority. If you cant get hold of one of these, then there's always the alternative of having all your individual marksheets photocopied, signed by the controller of exams and sealed by the university authorities. That is all there is to an official transcript...so that saves most of you quite a bit of 'psyching out time'.

Some things like the class rank, yearly/sem ranks are add-ons to the transcript. if possible try to get these as an official stamping on a good class rank is taken as a real boost to your app.

Have a very simple, neat and easy to understand transcript. you don't want your transcript to go to the Cryptography dept. for 'official' deciphering !!

So, a fairly simple but a really important document. Be true !!

-Oz

The GRE difference

Stumbled upon this real funny stuff to differentiate between a guy whose slooged through the GRE verbals...

GRE STUDENT : Individuals who make their abodes in vitreous edifices would be advised to refrain from catapulting perilous projectiles.
A NORMAL PERSON : People who live in glass houses should not throw stones.
*
GRE STUDENT : Scintillate, scintillate, asteroid minim.
NORMAL PERSON : Twinkle, twinkle, little star
*
GRE STUDENT : Sorting on the part of mendicants must be interdicted.
NORMAL PERSON : Beggars are not choosers
*
GRE STUDENT : Male cadavers are incapable of rendering any testimony.
NORMAL PERSON : Dead men tell no tales
*
GRE STUDENT : Neophyte's serendipity.
NORMAL PERSON : Beginner's luck
*
GRE STUDENT : A revolving litchi conglomerate accumulates no congeries of small, green, biophytic plant.
NORMAL PERSON : A rolling stone gathers no moss
*
GRE STUDENT: Members of an avian species of identical plumage tend to congregate.
NORMAL PERSON : Birds of a feather flock together
*
GRE STUDENT : Pulchritude possesses solely cutaneous profundity.
NORMAL PERSON : Beauty is only skin deep
*
GRE STUDENT : Freedom from incrustations of grime is contiguous to rectitude.
NORMAL PERSON : Cleanliness is godliness
*
GRE STUDENT : It is fruitless to attempt to indoctrinate a superannuated canine with innovative maneuvers.
NORMAL PERSON : You can't try to teach an old dog new tricks
*
GRE STUDENT : Surveillance should precede saltation.
NORMAL PERSON : Look before you leap
*
GRE STUDENT : The person presenting the ultimate cachinnation possesses thereby the optimal cachinnation.
NORMAL PERSON : He who laughs last, laughs best
*
GRE STUDENT : Where there are visible vapours having their provenance in ignited carbonaceous materials, there is conflagration.

NORMAL PERSON : Where there's smoke, there's fire! ...

-Oz

Return of the hated acronym : GRE

A level of Dante's hell should be reserved for the GREs. And by that I mean for the nefarious, sadistic individual who had the brilliant idea of torturing poor stressed fourth-years with a slow and painful death by bombardment of multiple choice questions. Unless obviously one devises some plans of his own. There once was a time when this test could make or break the destiny of an MS aspirant. Now, thankfully, admission committees tend to use it as a qualifying criteria. Now there...not to get you laxed, scoring well on the GRE is still very important...it's like the first impression of yours...and if that ain't good...hmmm... This is the breakdown: There is a 45-minute math section, a 30-minute verbal section and two analytical essays. Oh, and they throw in an extra verbal or math section for research, but of course, unless you are psychic, you won't be able to tell which is real and which is fake (which is veracious and which is spurious, in simple GRE lingo) and therefore, which section counts and which doesn't. And by the way, this is all done on a computer, through a program called the CAT (Computer Adaptive Test) which basically determines if you are smart or dumb after the first few questions, and proceeds with the test accordingly. Now, I was one of the few people who decided to give his GRE early...infact way in July '04, considering I was applying for Fall '05. This is generally considered early, but in my view, it's best to give it early than say in October or November. God forbid, you are struck by lightening midway through your test or just for fun the people at your center are coughing like it was an epidemic....and you end up with a low score. Well, in such a case if you are an 1100 in July...much better than an 1100 in October (with no dates to reschedule and evil thoughts creeping into your head). But, all said and done, one should schedule a test if and only if you know you would be prepared in time. Luckily for me, I remembered a lot of the Baron's wordlist from way back when I gave the SAT. 'n once the wordlists are out of the way....atleast i had a big smirk on my face... So, this is like the first GRE tip...Play it early and play it safe. And if you are taking it like this time of the year...make sure you don't screw up. Because the compromises one might have to make due to a low GRE...just not worth it... FYI: The weather here through northeast and midwest is really starting to cool down. Evenings are at times so freakishly cold...i wonder what it's gonna be when ze winter sets in.... -Oz PS: Thanks to the Cavalier Daily

Edulix Diaries - The Beginning

Hi Folks !! Welcome to this blog that will help you in your journey from what you've called a dream for so long. This is the space to watch out for all applicants for Higher studies to the USA. Though I'm sure I would be putting in my two-cents (not to be mistaken with the infamous '50-cents') on applying to Europe and Ozland aswell.

Anyways, in this brand new (*hot from the oven*) blog, I'm gonna pen down my experiences right from the painstaking wordlists to the pub-scene and nightlife right here in dreamland. Talking of nightlife, last saturday was quite eventful...(ahem..!!). on a totally different note, it's past my lunchtime and considering i just made it to home base (also read as submitted my homework) just in time, guess it's high time I grabbed a classic single (pretty soon you guys should be familiarized with the Wendy's lingo).

Guess I should cut my freaky talk and hereon I hope you enjoy my first hand experience of applying to the States...

...stay posted !!

-Oz