#110. Killing the GRE (Saturday, November 4th, 2017)

What was your best day…of performing well when the pressure was off?

As much as people don’t like to admit it, performance anxiety is most definitely a thing. I’ve definitely had this anxiety manifest itself at many points in my life, at times to highly regrettable outcomes. But this story is about a more cheerful case in point, a counterfactual; an instance where the absence of performance anxiety showed itself in the most pleasant of ways.

Context time. At the start of 2017, I had considered the idea of potentially going back to school to do a PhD. However, despite the support and guidance of my director and the researchers in my department (who I had a great relationship with, #115), I really didn’t have much of a clear direction on my own part. So all through the year, I kind of went along for the ride of explicitly preparing for PhD applications that fall – without ever being close to sure that’s what I wanted to do.¹

Ten months later, it was October, and the deadlines were coming up in two months. And I was lagging quite a bit behind in the process – and honestly, just wasn’t ready. But I was still intent on applying since I knew I needed a change from my current role. I had signed up for the GREs (the required standardized tests)² for the first Saturday in November, and was probably a week or so away from being forced to commit to some key application actions before it was too late: i.e. asking for that marginal third reference letter; plus actually finishing my Statement of Purpose (I was halfway through the first paragraph).

Then, in a roundabout way, I found out a position had opened up on the foreign reserves team.³ So I quickly arranged a talk with the director of that team, and within two weeks my move to foreign reserves was all finalized. And with that, I made the much easier decision to put the PhD applications on hold for at least a year.

So I came into testing day with a lot less pressure than I would have otherwise. Though I had been studying intently – mainly making sure I could recognize every single math trick in the book (could not afford one mistake there), and dividing the list of 200+ essay prompts into eight or nine broad “types” and developing a broad strategy for each type.

• Writing: 5.0 (89^th percentile)
• Verbal: 168 (99^th percentile)
• Quant: 170 (perfect)

(N.B. Those scores end up being completely useless, as I never get close to reconsidering a PhD in the five years after. But it’s about the principle, anyways…)

1. Between this and #113, you can see another theme developing…
2. I had actually done the GREs the first time in August 2011 for applying to Master’s programs. I got the all-important perfect 170 on Math, the strong but irrelevant 161 in Verbal, and the disappointingly mediocre 4.5 out of 6 on Writing. But after five years, those scores had expired and I had to retake.
3. Jessica from the pension fund was leaving for another institution. And at her goodbye party, I found out from Mathieu Remillard in foreign reserves that she was initially supposed to be doing a switch with him; but now that she was leaving, he was still moving to pension (TBA later) and there would be an open position in foreign reserves.
4. Luckily I’ve always built at least a 45-minute buffer for things like this.