#134. 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 very real. I’ve had it affect me at plenty of points in my life, sometimes with highly regrettable results. But this story is about the opposite case: what happened when the pressure was suddenly gone.
Context time. At the start of 2017, I had considered going back to school for a PhD. However, despite the support and guidance of my director and the researchers in my department, as well as some promising signs during the year (#52), I really didn’t have much of a clear direction myself. So all year, I went through the motions of preparing for PhD applications that fall without ever being close to sure that’s what I wanted to do.
By October, the application deadlines were two months away, and I was badly behind—and honestly, just wasn’t ready. I was still intent on applying because I knew I needed a change from my current role. I had signed up for the GRE (the required standardized test)1 for the first Saturday in November and was probably a week away from having to commit to the application for real: asking for that marginal third reference letter and actually finishing my Statement of Purpose, which was still halfway through its first paragraph.
Then, somewhat indirectly through Mathieu Remillard (#58), I found out a position had opened up on the foreign reserves team. So I quickly arranged a talk with the team’s director, and within two weeks the move was 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. I had been studying intently—mainly making sure I could recognize every single math trick in the book (I could not afford one mistake there), and dividing the list of 200+ essay prompts into eight or nine broad “types” and developing a strategy for each.
Test day did not get off to a good start: I took the highway in the wrong direction—east while the test center was west—and didn’t notice for ten minutes2. But that would be the last thing I messed up that day. Final score:
- Writing: 5.0 (89th percentile)
- Verbal: 168 (99th percentile)
- Quant: 170 (perfect score)
N.B. Those scores ended up being completely useless, as I never got close to reconsidering a PhD in the five years that followed. But it’s about the principle, anyway…