I got off at the Albany exit and headed towards Corvallis. In ten minutes we were crossing the Calapooia into the quiet downtown. As we circled through the grid of sleepy businesses, not wanting to get out into the heat if didn't have to, I told Red, "this is what I do when I'm traveling. When I get to a town, I like to see the downtown, and if it's a college town like this, go over to the campus."
As we drove around the perimeter of the very quiet OSU campus, I told Red about the only time I'd been to Corvallis. It was the fall of 1988, right at the tail end of my time at Willamette. I took the Greyhound bus down from Salem to take the Physics subject-area GRE test, which was necessary for graduate school applications. I walked from the bus depot to the building on the OSU campus where the test was being held. Then afterwards I walked back and caught the bus back home.
I was living in a cheap apartment on the east edge of Salem ("Felony Flats," as we called it, since it was near the state penitentiary) and had almost no furniture except for a mattress to sleep on, and an old television sitting on a milk crate, on which I watched Kirk Gibson hobble out to the plate and hit his famous home run in the World Series.
My graduate school applications were laid out on the carpet of the big empty living room of my apartment, organized and ready to send when the materials were collected. At the time, I thought the physics subject-area GREs would be a major component in the admissions process. After taking the test in Corvallis that day, I knew I'd pooched a bunch of the questions, because my knowledge in various areas was simply not robust. Back then there were no study guides, so I'd simply gone in with whatever knowledge I'd garnered from three years of undergraduate coursework.
A couple years later when I was at the University of Texas, I volunteered to serve as the student representative on the graduate recruitment committee of the physics department, along with about half a dozen professors and the department chairman. Our task was to review new graduate student applications, and to select the best ones. It gave me a good view into how the process actually worked, the same one I had been through as an applicant only a few years before. I learned what actually mattered, and what didn't.
For example, the weight given to GRE scores was a bit different than I expected. In the regular GRE areas, the ones that everyone takes, it turned out that the committee cared more about the verbal scores than the math scores, especially for foreign students.
"These people have to be able to speak English, to teach labs to the undergraduates," one of the committee members told me, in explaining the importance of the verbal scores. "Some of them can't put two sentences together, and the kids all flood the university with complaints that they can't understand their instructors."
"On the other hand, the Chinese all blow the top off the math section, because they spend their entire college career studying to beat the test and get into American graduate schools. It doesn't mean they actually can do any physics."
Likewise, for the same reason, the committee gave little weight to the physics subject area of the test. If one scored abnormally low, it might be taken as a red flag, but high scores were discounted for the same reason as the math scores. They weren't considered a reliable indicator of how much physics you really knew, just how well you could master that one particular test.
Back in Oregon, I'd busted the curve on the verbal and math sections of the GRE, right up there with the Chinese on the latter part, but my physics score from that afternoon in Corvallis had been middle-of-the-pack, typical for an American applicant. In Austin, hearing how it really worked, I felt a bit silly at how much I'd stressed over it at the time.
It turns out there is a secret fool-proof method for getting into physics graduate school, which I inferred from my time on the committee. The most important section of the application is not one's test scores, or even one's grades. It's not the recommendations either. "Ninety-five percent of the recommendations you get just say 'he showed up and did his work,'" said one of the committee members.
It turns out that the most important part of the application was the essay, in which one describes the reason one wants to be a physicist at that particular institution. The applicants who stood out from the pack were the ones that had clearly thought out a line of research they intended to pursue that reflected their own interests, and which overlapped strongly with something that a researcher in the department was already doing.
My advice to anyone in the same position is: if you are interested in going to graduate school in physics (or any other field for that matter), then go to the web site of the department and peruse the publications and abstracts of the researchers there, and find one or two folks whom you might enjoy working for. If you can't find anyone like that, then you probably shouldn't apply there. But if you do, write an essay that says how you want to work on that particular research area. Get very specific. Pretend you are already a physicist, looking for work. Sound like you know what the hell you are doing. Make yourself the perfect fit as a lab grunt and eventual researcher and co-author. You can always change your mind once you're there (as I did).
As it happens, I did something quite similar to this in the months before I went to Austin (after I was already accepted). By the time I got to Texas, I already knew the names of most of the professors in the research center in which I wanted to work, and was familiar with their various noted accomplishments. Even though it didn't affect my original application, it turned out to have been invaluable effort in the long run.
Of course I did this before the Internet as we know it. Looking back, I'm not quite sure how I pulled it off. Somehow I just did. Who among us who lived much of our lives before the mid-1990s hasn't thought the same thing at some point? How the heck did we do anything before the web?
No comments:
Post a Comment