SOPTalk

Yesterday’s Newsweek carried a story about the exploding demand for pharmacists - apparently the US will need 150,000 more by 2020 to meet the needs of aging baby boomers. Similarly, the Washington Post last week talked about the shortage of faculty in business schools. Stories like this point to hot careers, and give an idea about an applicant’s chances in those areas. Business school doctoral programs, for instance, are competing for good doctoral students. According to the Washington Post article, doctoral salaries have sharply risen, along with the international demand for business PhDs. This means that it’s a good time to apply to a business doctoral program - most also offer a reasonable stipend, healthcare and a full tuition waiver. And business schools can be fairly broad - so if you’ve been thinking of getting a PhD in industrial engineering, say, or industrial psychology or sociology, it may be possible to do it in the business school and have interdisciplinary links with other departments. Applicants for business PhDs, therefore, would be right at the front of the demand curve and be able to pick better programs in a seller’s market.

On the other hand, someone applying to a graduate program in Pharmacy might be behind the curve. The Newsweek article says that the pharmacy applicant pool has roughly doubled in the last five years, bringing down acceptance rates. So even with a good statement of purpose and a decent application, now may not be a good time to hope for admission to a good program. The article also says that with more colleges opening, the situation may ease up in the next few years. But for someone who thinks this is a perfect time to apply for a graduate degree, it may also be worthwhile to look at affiliated branches and programs such as those in chemical engineering, biotechnology, microbiology and so on. One thing to take away from the Newsweek article is that the global drug industry is booming. It is possible to latch on to it through a number of areas, not just pharmacy.

Check out the articles:

Washington Post article on shortage of business PhDs

Newsweek article on demand for pharmacists

Tags: Application advice, General, News stories by seemantini
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Today’s New York Times talks about the biggest revamp in the history of the Graduate Record Exam. What does it mean for someone who’s thinking of applying to graduate school? A salient change is in the length and format of the exam - now it will be almost twice as long, and internet-based. It will also be more difficult - the article says there will be a greater emphasis on higher cognitive skills in the verbal section and on interpretation in the quantitative section. It seems from this that you have to do better to get an equivalent score (although percentile scores may not be significantly affected, since they rank test-takers), while preparing for a new format. At the same time, you hope that the schools you apply to are sufficiently aware of what to expect with the results of the revamped test.

ETS (the agency that administers the test) has delayed rollout of the revamped test until Fall 2007. If possible, therefore, it might be a smart strategy to try and take the test in the old format before the rollout. ETS has had occasional glitches with rollouts, and you would not want to be among those affected by a possible difficulty in the system. In any case, a new system takes time to get used to, not only by test-takers, but also by administrators and universities who are consumers of test results. And test preparation centers may not have a suitably effective curriculum in place till they have a chance to learn from the new set-up.

So if you have change anxiety try and take the test before they change it. But keep things in context - the GRE is only one part of your application packet. A disastrous score may kick you off the list of serious applicants, but if you are within a reasonable range of scores, it will not make or break your chances by itself. Focus on strengthening the rest of your application. Some schools accept the subject GRE as well - a good score on that can mitigate a little the effects of substandard GRE performance. Similarly, business schools may accept the GMAT or GRE, and you could hedge your bets by writing the GMAT as well.

In any case, check out Tamar Lewin’s article. It also talks about some pretty interesting strategies people have used to cheat on the exam (in fact, they’re revamping the test largely because of such security concerns).

nytimesgrearticle

EDUCATION | February 22, 2006
Testing Service Delays Rollout of Revamped Graduate Exam
By TAMAR LEWIN
The maker of the Graduate Record Exam said it encountered problems with setting up enough Internet-based test centers for test-takers.

Tags: Application advice, General, News stories by seemantini
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Jay Mathews writes the Class Struggle column for the Washington Post. He’s written an op-ed piece today about standardized testing and how the conventional wisdom on it’s effects on classroom testing is overblown. I grew up in an environment where everybody taught to the test and the effects weren’t pretty. Many of our classes explicitly revolved around questions that had been posed in previous public exams and we were encouraged to memorize model answers to the set of questions most likely to be repeated. Then again, this was in India and it’s not valid to assume that such perversions are the natural outcome of systems like these. The write-up is interesting enough. Have a look at Let’s teach to the test

Tags: General, News stories by hardik
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I read this a few months ago and recommend that everybody with an interest in college admission essays read it

http://www.slate.com/id/2125147

Tags: General, News stories by hardik
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