This guest post comes from Yun Ye, who is not only interning at VOA this semester, but also applying to graduate school. She recently attended an information session for her top choice school, and came back with a new perspective on the role of the GRE in admissions.

More and more Chinese students are attending graduate school in the U.S. – 88,429 at last count, an increase of 15% from the previous year – and how to get into the dream school is something weighing on the minds of many Chinese students.

Among my friends in China who, like me, wanted to pursue higher education in the U.S., the conversation was often about what schools we were planning to apply to and how we planned to get in – and when we thought about how we planned to get in, we often thought about our test scores.

In Chinese education, grades are the most important thing to a student. When I was at school, I remember striving for an excellent grade had been almost everyone’s goal. With that mentality, when my friends and former classmates started applying to U.S. grad schools, they put a lot of pressure on themselves to get a high score on the Graduate Record Examination (GRE). The GRE is a standardized test required for admission at most graduate schools.

People who got a good score on the GRE would share their study experiences on online forums, which others would read in the hopes of emulating their performance.  Chinese students preparing to study abroad get very familiar with forums such as “Xiaomaguohe.com,” “Taisha” or “Jituo.”

I also know people who spent a lot of money on classes to prepare for the GRE test, and people who dedicated a couple of months to studying; some people even took half a year to study.

I’m sure all that studying will eventually pay off in their scores, but I learned something valuable when I visited graduate schools recently in preparation for my own applications: the GRE score isn’t as important as my Chinese classmates made it out to be.

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Before you apply to graduate school, you have to do a lot of research to figure out where to apply.  What schools offer the courses you want?  Where will you have the best rapport with the professors?  What program will set you up for the best career?

I’m going through this process right now, as are some of my friends.  We’ve all been approaching it in different ways, so I thought I would share our experiences with you so you can learn about different strategies and find one that will work for you.

Above all you can see that you should not be shy about contacting people who may be able to give you information about various programs.  Just make sure that you approach them in a professional way that indicates you are serious about pursuing your studies.

Student 1: Contacting program coordinators for official information

One friend is currently pursuing her studies in communication and hopes to attend graduate school in TV production.  She is an outgoing person who is good at networking, and had no problems reaching out for information.  She chose to contact program coordinators, hoping to learn more details about the campuses and programs.

The contact information for program coordinators is almost always available on the program’s website. She emailed several program coordinators for graduate programs she is interested in. In the email, she had a general description of herself and expressed her eagerness to meet with them. Coordinators replied to her very soon and set up appointments with her, offering to have a face-to-face talk and share some information materials.

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We have a student e-mail list at the graduate school I am attending. It gets all sorts of posts and threads (groups of posts and responses to them), from announcements of free food, to the buying and selling of goods and services, outings, events, academic questions and answers, news and video clips … the works.

A student from India made an interesting observation on it not too long ago. He said:

I recently became aware of a cross-cultural academic nuance that I had to share. Apparently it is inappropriate to ask fellow students about their grades here in the US. This is in complete contrast to the educational experience in India where not only is this a very fair question, you almost never had to ask to find out. That is because a lot of schools would post the result of the entire student body on public notice boards for everyone to see.

This nuance (“Cultural étiquette 101″, as he put it) came as a bit of news to me too, actually. I come from India as well, and although I never went to college there, people were indeed very free and open about their marks at school. They were never grades, by the way - what do those few letters mean, after all? It was always marks out of a hundred or out of twenty or twenty-five; competition was stiff among the millions of students in India and getting, say, 91.2% or 91.3% might have made all the difference between acceptance and rejection to an institution or a scholarship.

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I had the great pleasure today to join VOA Learning English for a live video chat about studying in the U.S. A lot of you submitted questions in advance on Facebook, and we took some Skype calls during the chat as well.

It was a great time and we covered a lot of topics, including what it costs, how to get scholarships, what you have to do to get a visa, whether international students are allowed to work, and how to improve your English.

Watch it again here:

UPDATE: The video’s now annotated to help you find the important parts and skip over the rest. Put your cursor over the thin blue lines to see what questions we discussed and navigate directly to what you want to hear.

I had a total “brain fart” (memory loss) on the question of what’s considered a good TOEFL score. We actually discussed that in the blog post “What are Typical Application Deadlines and TOEFL Requirements?,” so go there for the answer.

Did we answer your questions?  What other questions do you have about studying in the U.S.?

Mohammed’s post yesterday about the amount of coursework assigned in American classes got me thinking about some other differences about studying in the States. Here are 5 of the biggest academic adjustments you might face, based on what I’ve heard students talk about:

1) Assignments are due throughout the semester

As Mohammed warned, course grades usually don’t depend on one final examination, but on a number of pieces of work submitted over an entire semester.

Some have papers that you have to write every week, others have group projects you have to work on with your classmates, presentations you do in the class, or research you do by yourself to prove a thesis you come up with.

So, instead of being stressed out all at once at the end of the semester, you get to be stressed out in little bits all the way through. Out of the frying pan and into the fire, as they say.

2) Participation matters

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The United States is diverse in many ways: it is a big country, with a few hundred million people, different kinds of geography and climate, regional accents alongside native speakers of probably hundreds of other languages, various customs, cuisines, and even styles of clothing. Education is unsurprisingly no exception.

Before... (Creative Commons photo by Flickr user Austin Reid Manny)

I just graduated, in May, from St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a very unique establishment of higher education, even for Americans. For four years, all we did was read and discuss “the great books” of the Western tradition in an all-required curriculum.

There was a lot of philosophy and literature, plus mathematics and science, music, logic, languages… a very “Renaissance” education. No exams, no tests, not even grades (they actually do give grades, to be frank, but they do not reveal them unless a student specifically makes the request; I never checked mine). We wrote a lot of papers and original essays, and had amazing conversations. That’s what a good old fashioned liberal arts degree is all about. Ask any American, and they’ll find that sort of college experience to be very extraordinary. And it was.

Now I am starting graduate school, a master’s program in politics and international affairs at a pretty prestigious institution. It’s not in New Mexico, but in New England. Different. Very, very different. The location itself has an atmosphere that does not compare to Santa Fe.

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My bags are packed, my final papers submitted, my apartment sublet, and as of next week I’ll be gone from George Washington University and the United States until the end of August.  It’s been a fast nine months, but I’ve officially reached the halfway point of my two-year graduate school program.

To mark reaching the end of year one, I’ve put together some superlatives for my first year at graduate school:

Biggest Adjustment:

Working on a class assignment

My first blog post last October was all about the workload difference between graduate school and undergrad.

Having to read 1,000 pages a week for class, depending on the week, was pretty miserable sometimes.  There were definitely some long nights in the library where I wanted to be anyplace else.

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Working on a class assignment

By the end of this semester I will have a total of seven graduate-level classes under my belt.

Although different professors have had different teaching styles, I think I’m finally getting used to what to expect from a graduate school political science or history class.

A lot of class discussion

All but one of my graduate school classes have had less than twenty students. Such a small class size means that participation in class discussions is often a large part of our final grade (about 20-25%). Even if it isn’t, our professors always make clear that they expect us to actively raise points and engage with one another in class.

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“If anything is certain, it is that change is certain.”
-Philip Crosby

The Unexpected Gets a Vote

Three years ago I got a brief taste of what my life would become today. It all started with a new year’s resolution: to make all of my work count for something by seeing it through to the finish.

All you need to do is search Flickr to find out that people worldwide hate putting together DIY tables (Creative commons photo by Flickr user Betty B)

In February 2008, my friends and I moved into a new apartment in a new neighborhood back in Malaysia (where I did my undergrad). We spent about half of the day moving in furniture and trying to put things in order – a hideous task, to be honest.

By day’s end all the furniture was in place except for one computer table that needed to be assembled. It was 2am, I was exhausted, and I had zero IQ in woodwork.

Any other time I might have decided to put it aside until the morning and then wake up three months later to see it still undone. And I probably wouldn’t be bothered by it either.

But I had a new year’s resolution to execute. So I quickly opened the package before my mind changed.

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My old college roommate jetted into town last weekend for a conference with his New York law firm.  He’s the kind of guy who at 26 already has the key pieces of his life put together.  He graduated from NYU law school in May, proposed to his longtime girlfriend in August while vacationing in Europe, moved into a spacious Manhattan apartment in October, and started working at a multinational firm in November.  Basically, he’s one of those people who I always feel like I’m playing catch-up with.

How competitive is graduate school?

Seeing my roommate got me thinking about competition and rivalry in graduate school.  To what extent do grad students compare themselves to one another and worry about getting ahead?  The stereotype for me has always been that school gets really competitive as you move up the ladder.  I’ve heard horror stories about graduate students at elite universities hiding books from one another and stealing notes to make sure they get the best grade in the class.  Everyone wants so badly to succeed, and there’s only so much room at the top.

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By now you may have heard that tens of thousands of Chinese students have had their October GRE scores canceled by the Educational Testing Service (ETS).  The problem? An administrative error caused the ETS to administer an old exam by accident.

Understandably, affected students are not too pleased, and some are reportedly considering a lawsuit against the ETS.

Tara Cheng took the GREs in China last year.  Here’s her reaction:

As a previous GRE test-taker, I know exactly how hard and torturing the process of preparation is, especially for people whose native language is not English. I can still recall vividly spending nearly half a year walking alone from the library to my dorm with a heavy load of test materials in the chilly night of Beijing.

The cancellation of the test result is indeed a disaster for Chinese students because the GRE is only held twice a year, in June and October, within mainland China.  That means you have to be successful within two tries, otherwise your application would probably be delayed to next year. As many Chinese students have been saying, it is indeed disappointing and unfair that test-takers are punished by the fault of ETS.

But things are not that bad because ETS will hold a new exam to make up for the canceled one, which will allow students to catch up with the application deadlines of most schools in America. For applicants with an early deadline, I suggest you to talk to schools you are applying as soon as possible and keep them updated with your happenings. Most schools will figure out a way to deal with your case, probably by accepting the unofficial score temporarily or other ways. I am truly sorry to hear about this, but I believe those test-takers will give a better performance in the upcoming re-held exam.

How would you have reacted if this had happened to you?  Do you know someone who’s been affected? We’ve been having a conversation about it on Facebook.

I sometimes think of my graduate program at George Washington University as a rite of passage.  It helps keep me motivated through those 12 hour days in the library, when I worry that I’m wasting the prime years of my life cooped-up in books.

Students at the Global Resources Center

I remember what my political science professor said on our first day of class: “If you’re a graduate student, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be reading all the time.”  He was talking about the trials of graduate study and his personal approach to teaching.  Of course, last week he appropriately assigned 553 pages on the comparative historical analysis of revolutionary change.

I think a lot of professors share that mindset though.  I met last April with my former Russian literature professor, who gave similar advice that, as a young man at this point in my life, I should be working my fingers to the bone.  His exact words: “Now’s the time to be like Stoltz!” – a particularly industrious, and awesome, character from Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov.

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