Grad School GRE Score Debacle

I’m taking another class, and it’s a big pain in my ass.  I think I’m doing pretty well though.  As my lame post a couple of months ago explained, I’m working really hard at doing well in school.  I’m trying to prove to Columbia that I’m grad-school worthy.  Which brings me to the reason for this post.

Everyone I tell about being rejected not accepted to the grad program is usually shocked.  When I told my boss at work he was floored — “WHAAAT?  You didn’t get in?”.  I’m not trying to go on an ego trip here, but the fact that I didn’t get in on multiple applications was a bit unusual, especially considering the fact that I’m taking grad classes now and kicking ass. They let ‘tards into ivy league schools.  Really, they do.  And for the record… Ivy League ain’t no thang.  In some ways, Minnesota State had its shit together more than this place does.  I’m getting to a point, here.  Stick with me.

Point being, something was up.  Something was off.  The admissions guidelines were fucked up.  Anyway, my boss offered to write me a recommendation for spring admission, which is great.  I mean, come on, put me in the program now.  I work on your campus, as a programmer, the head of a department is writing my recommendation, I’m in your classes, and I’m not a mo-mo.  Put me in your program, for christs sake.

So the other day I went on Columbia’s web site to reactivate my application, and I was looking over my old information.  I clicked on “test scores”, and noticed a strange oddity with my GRE scores.

The verbal and the quantitative scores were flipped.

[pause for reaction]

My painfully low verbal score and my high quantitative score were reversed (!) , making me look like an math retarded english major applying to be a computer science grad student — someone they would understandably reject!

Seriously, this has to play a part.

I had mixed feelings about it at first.  When I first realized the error, my jaw literally dropped, and I sat there pondering the implications for a solid few minutes.

I came to the conclusion that it’s not all that bad, though.  This makes sense.   No longer am I racking my brain on the mystery as to how an Ivy league school would pay me to write programs for critical clinical drug trials, but not allow me to pay them to learn how to write better programs.  Anyway, I’m not sure if it was my fault or theirs.  I filled out the application online, but somehow I think they had a problem with their entry form, and it flipped the values.  Even so, I did send them a hard copy of the GRE scores which definitely have the correct values on them, so they must not have checked.  They do have loads of applications, apparently.

So, consider this.  First, let’s assume me not getting into the program was based solely on those scores, which is what I’m choosing to believe at this point.  Now let’s examine the two paths life could have taken.

Path 1: The scores were put in correctly, and I was accepted into the grad program.  I start grad school full time upon moving to New York.  I’d currently be approximately 25k in debt.

Path 2: The scores were put in incorrectly, and I was rejected from the grad program.  I find a cushy job working at Columbia, where they pay for my grad school entirely.

Path 2 isn’t so bad, really.