Here from Dilip Oak’s Academy are the GRE Prep highlights. As the graphic above indicates the basic plan for verbal preparation for the GRE is as follows:
- at least 3-5 months before your GRE, begin vocabulary preparation and preliminary reading practice
- 2 months before your GRE, begin going through the practice material
- 1 month before your GRE, begin your practice on the Computer-Based Tests (CBTS)
This is explained below: As you can see there are four aspects of preparation that you have to cover:
- Vocabulary Learning and Revision
- Preliminary Reading Practice
- Covering the Practice Material
- Practice on the Computer-Based Tests (CBTs)
Each of the sections below gives you a brief idea of how to handle one aspect of preparation. Each section also contains links (in red) which give you further important details about the aspect of preparation that it deals with. Before you read through the sections below read through the post on ‘some principles’ for GRE Preparation. This will give you important guidelines on how to work through the material described in each of the sections.
- 1. Vocabulary Learning – 4,000 words to be covered: preferably begin 3-5 months before your GRE, use the following:
- VaiVocabulary – most important: sincerely go through all quizzes, the rapid revision and the difficulty-based revision sessions
- FlashCards and FlashCard Companion – the FlashCard Companion booklet gives you a sample phrase for every meaning of every word in the FlashCards.
Click here for the detailed post on Vocabulary Preparation and Revision
- 2. Preliminary Reading:
Begin your preparatory reading preferably a minimum of 3-5 months before your GRE, so that before you begin work on the Oak’s practice material you have already developed some basic reading skills and have some exposure to areas outside your academy specialization. The preliminary reading consists of:
- Paper-based reading – newspaper editorials
- Online reading – websites containing articles with higher-level language
- Easy reading comprehension – e.g. TOEFL material
Once you have finished the preliminary reading, go on to the reading comprehension material in the practice material (see 3. Practice Material immediately below).
Click here for the detailed blog on Preliminary Reading
- 3. Practice Material (paper-based) – This is the material in your Home Work packets. Begin approximately 2 months before your GRE
Click here for the detailed blog on working through the Practice Material
- 4. Computer Based Tests– begin 1 month before your GRE, take 1 test every 2-3 days. There are 7 tests (see below), so working at this pace will take you a month or so to complete them.
- 5 Oak’s online CBTs
- 2 full-length tests in the ETS PowerPrep II software
Click here for more on going through the Computer-Based Tests
Related Posts (Tips for the Quantitative Section):
Related Posts (GRE Exam Overview):
- The Revised GRE – Structure, Research Sections, Multi-Stage Adaptive Testing, Score Scales
- Challenges in the Verbal Section of the Revised GRE
- Reading Comprehension and Sentence Completion (Discrete) Question Types
- Question Types in the Quantitative Reasoning Section
- The Analytical Writing Section
Guiding Principles
I. First Techniques, Then Timing
When working on your practice material, first get comfortable with the techniques and start focusing on timing only when you have reached a high level of accuracy and confidence with the techniques. If you try to push yourself to do the questions faster, without first getting a good grasp of the techniques, you will end up making more mistakes and losing confidence. So,start by getting accurate and confident with the techniques first.
II. Integrate Vocabulary Learning and Practice
- Read the vocabulary before you do the exercise – it does not matter whether the exercise is a Reading Comprehension or Discrete Question (Sentence Completion) one. If you are an Oak’s Academy student, remember that in Book 2 the vocabulary is given before the exercise, in the other books the vocabulary is given in the explanatory answers material. If you are not an Oak’s Academy student, quickly glance through the exercise, looking for any unfamiliar words and then look up any words you don’t know on a site like dictionary.com.
- Knowing the words before you do the exercise, will ensure that doing the exercise is meaningful: you can’t do the exercise if you don’t know the words.
- Also, since all the words in the exercise are GRE words, going through the vocabulary for the exercise will help you cover the word list. (This will be your first exposure to the words.)
- Then do the exercise. Here you will automatically revise the words as you go through the question. This will be your second exposure to the words. (Note: once in a while, do exercises without first looking up the words. This will give you some practice in working on questions where you don’t know the vocabulary.)
- Then read the explanatory answers making sure that you go over the vocabulary once more. (This will be your third exposure to the words.)
Benefits:
- You will learn GRE words – remember that all the vocabulary that you come across in the practice material is part of the GRE word list.
- Doing the exercises will become meaningful – if you don’t know the meaning of the words in the passages, sentences and questions in the exercise, doing the exercise becomes meaningless and frustrating. Doing separate vocabulary learning side-by-side does not necessarily solve the problem since the vocabulary that you learn may not be the vocabulary that you need in the exercise. (This is why the Oak’s material contains extensive word lists covering the vocabulary in the exercises.)
III. Integrate CBT and Paper-based Practice
- When you are going through your paper-based practice material (Home Work packet) reserve a third or a quarter of the material (or mark out the difficult questions) to come back to when you begin doing the CBTs.
- When you start doing your CBTs, identify which questions you are weak on and go back to those questions in the paper-based HW material you have reserved or marked out as difficult.
IV. Carry out Remedial Work
- Error Analysis: Whenever you do any practice material, whether paper- or computer-based, Note the mistakes that you make, especially those you make repeatedly. Oak’s students, meet the faculty to discuss your errors and find out how to prevent them – but do this well before your exam date, not at the last minute, so that you have time to practice and eliminate your errors.
- Vocabulary Work: The most common cause of wrong answers in Sentence Completion type questions is unknown vocabulary. Look up all the vocabulary that you do not know. If you get a Sentence Completion question wrong, look up the vocabulary even if you think you already know the meaning of the words – there might be a secondary meaning that you have not come across before.
For more great tips read:
- Tips from a Student Who Scored 337 Part 1
- Tips from a Student Who Scored 337 Part 2
- Tips from a Student Who Scored 335
Working students can also read the following:
This post is written by our guest author: Ameya Kanitkar
Ameya holds master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University. Currently he works as a Software Engineer at a startup in Silicon Valley, California.
If there is one industry which is booming in US, it’s the technology industry. If you hold an engineering degree in Computer Science/ Computer Engineering/ Information Systems/ ECE, you should strongly consider pursuing your postgraduate degree in the US. Here in the valley, companies are fighting for top tech talent – and the scenario is going crazy: entry-level software engineer salaries have already crossed $100,000/year mark. But when we say Computer Science there is more to it. This post is attempt to dive into various branches and see how various opportunities are stacking up in the US in general.
Web Technologies – Typically these are front end technologies. It starts with something simple like CSS/HTML, and starts getting more and more complex with MVC frameworks, and JavaScript. Do not underestimate JavaScript. People are writing full stack in JavaScript. Check out node.js or backbone.js to get a better idea. There are plenty of jobs in web technologies. Most of these jobs are concentrated in the Silicon Valley (San Francisco) area. If you are interested in this, pick up some nice web language/framework like Ruby on Rails, learn JQuery, and start your own website. That’s what I did when I started FurlanGo a couple of years ago.
Mobile Technologies – Mobile apps are hot. If you can write nice iPhone/iPad/android apps you are in business. Pick up Objective C. If that’s too much, at least start writing android apps; you can write the app in your favorite Java. Developers are building some really cool apps. Check this out. Again there are plenty of jobs in Mobile space. This is something you can do in your free time as well, and would definitely put you ahead of the competition to get the job.
Large Scale Data Processing/ Distributed Systems – This is what I work on so, I can talk about this with bit more authority. As internet companies are amassing huge piles of data, companies need a piece of infrastructure to process all this data. Technologies here are very open-source oriented. A good way to understand this in a bit more detail, is read the Big Table paper by Google, or the Dynamo paper by Amazon. Big data was further democratized by Yahoo, when it open sourced Hadoop. There are more jobs in this area than there are qualified people available. Typically all large internet companies are hiring in this area: Google, Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn, Groupon to name a few. How can you crack in if you are a fresh graduate? Try reading those above papers. Learn Hadoop on your own. You can fire up your own cluster in EC2 and do something interesting with this data. And yes, keep your basics in Distributed Systems up to date.
Algorithms/ Machine Learning – If you are good at Statistics and Maths consider pursuing a career in Machine Learning. Engineers in this field are highly paid and highly sought after. One advantage of this option is that you can get jobs in both Silicon Valley companies as well as Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Lot of on campus hiring on east coast schools happens for banks. Keep your basics in Data Structures, Statistics and Computers Science fresh to land these jobs. After the slump in 2009-2010, these jobs are coming back: yes, the market is back up to 13,000 levels
Compiler/ Storage/ Virtualization – A lot of ECE folks end up with the jobs in this area. These are more system-level fields. Companies like Apple, Intel, Cisco, VMware, EMC are active recruiters for students with this concentration. If you like ‘C’ and OS-level system level stuff then chose this area.
Enterprise Software – Most jobs in Indian IT companies, like Infosys, TCS, are in Enterprise Software. According to me this is boring compared to work in the fields above, but what the heck, they are jobs. If you have worked in India in Enterprise Software (Like SAP, Oracle etc) you may have an upper hand here.
Business Analyst/ Technology Consultants – If you are not from a 100% Computer Science background, but did something like Masters in Information Systems etc, you have a good shot at one of these jobs. I found it lot harder to land a job as a Business Analyst job than as a Technology Consultant.
Of course, there are more areas than those I have mentioned above, but the ones given above are the representative ones. Now decide which one you like. If you are already in US pursuing your masters in CS, then see which one you like and do a side project in your spare time. This will greatly increase your chances of getting into the top tech companies. If you are in India, deciding on a school to attend, see what you like the most and choose a school which is good at what you would like to do. Some schools like Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University, are pretty good at all of the above, but make sure your school selection is consistent with what you want to do. Finally, if you are confused, don’t worry. Follow your heart, and eventually you will figure it out! Good luck.
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What Recommendation Letters should Cover
Recommendation letters should cover the following points (also see the links to great sample recos at the end of this post):
- How long the recommender has known you and in what capacity (teacher, seminar or project guide, practical supervisor, project leader etc.)
- His or her assessment of your academic performance (relative rank etc.), intellectual abilities, work habits and character
- Your special achievements – especially in projects or in papers presented
- Your communication skills – how well you were able to present your seminars
- Your social skills – ability to work well with others, leadership qualities
- Some background about the recommender – this is useful in the case of professors whose work in a field might be good but little known outside India; things to highlight include area of work, achievements in that area (papers published, awards etc.), prominent places worked in, length of experience and so on
What Gives a recommendation Letter its Weight
But what is it that makes a recommendation letter really good? One key thing is that the letter does not just give a summary of performance and qualities that tells the reader that you were a good student in class. It should back up its claims with a narration of incidents that show how you showed initiative, creativity, perseverance, intelligence, leadership or various other admirable qualities(!) in your project work, problems assigned, seminars and so on. The narration of specific evidence adds credibility to your recommender’s assertions that you are a good candidate. Check out these useful links and find out:
- What is a Good Letter of Recommendation (some simple guidelines for your recommender)
- A ‘Fill-in-the-Blanks’ Recommendation Format (an easy to use outline that can be filled in with your details just to give you the first draft of a recommendation letter for you i.e. it will give you an idea of what a recommendation letter for you would look like. Warning: lots of people will be tempted to use this draft to directly create recommendation letters for themselves. Don’t do this. Admissions Committees at the university you are applying for will spot the similarities, and when that happens your recommendation letters will become effectively useless. So, ask your recommender to get creative and draft his own letter, crafting it to as uniquely as possible for your specific case. See these excellent guidelines for recommenders by Shriram Krishnamurti, a professor of computer science at Brown university – specially important for excellent students)
- Some Basic Sample Letters of Recommendation (same advantages and warnings as above)
- Good Sample Recommendation Letters from Penn State University (note these are ‘ideal’ letters from very non-engineering field. So, you won’t be able to use them directly, but they will give you an excellent idea of what great recommendation letters look like)
Some Practical Pointers
If you include the letter in your application packet, it must be sealed and signed by the person who gave it to you. Nowadays however, universities are increasingly asking recommenders to submit their recommendation letters online .
One final word about recommendation letters: remember that writing a recommendation letter is a lot of work for a teacher or a superior at work to do for you. Apart from drafting the letter they will also have to take care of a lot of little details like sealing and signing the envelopes or uploading the letter on to the university site. When they have to do that for 8-10 different universities, all those little details pile up. Keep good relations with them and give them the motivation to write persuasively and well on your behalf! (For an interesting insight into the problems of handling online recommendation letter submissions see what Joe Schall of Penn State has to say here)
Related Links:
In Pune University the process of applying for transcripts is as follows:
- Download the transcript form from the website of Pune University
- Fill up the form and submit the form in person at the transcripts department – this is located on university campus. Do not forget to carry original mark sheets if required for verification. In case you are asked to submit mark sheets, submit photocopies not originals.
- Pay the required fees immediately at Bank of Maharashtra counter located on the university campus.
Notes:
- To save some money, you can also apply for one original transcript and, after you have received the original, photocopy it and get the copies attested by the university.
- It may take up to a month for the university to issue you your original transcripts
- The university does not take so long to issue attested photocopies – only 10 days or so
The following link (click here) will also give you further information on the following questions:
- how many transcripts should I ask for?
- do all universities accept college transcripts?
- are the requirements different for students who have done a diploma before the degree?
- what do I do if I have studied in two different colleges?
- where should I get the envelope stamped and signed?
- do I need the college stamp and registrar’s signature in original on photocopies of the letterhead?
Related Links