GRE Score 324. Lessons Learnt.

Harmeet is a senior year student at The NorthCap University. He talks to Raj in this video and shares the best practices and lessons that he learnt from making mistakes during his bachelors degree.

Harmeet is now with Connexio to apply to top universities in the US and we are very hopeful that he will succeed.

Here are the most important points that came out of the discussion -

• Harmeet — If you are in cyber security and think that you don’t need to be a good coder. It's a myth. You need to be good at coding.

• Harmeet — Start preparing for GRE from 2nd year. Verbal word prep is huge and it takes a lot of time to get good at it. Also, you should have some buffer incase you don’t get the score that you expected.

• Harmeet — Use words that you learn when you speak with someone or text somebody.

• Raj — The battle is only half won once you get to the university. When you are here, your first focus should be to get an internship.

• Raj — GPA is the first filter for the universities, then it’s the GRE and once you cross these threshold the SOPs and LORs help you reserve your spot with a school.

• Raj — don’t look at the number of students that a university accepts, look at what the acceptance rate (# of students accepted / Total # of students who applied) for a university is.

HERE IS THE TRANSCRIPT. Incase you feel like reading. ;-)

Harmeet is a final year engineering student. He is pursuing Computer Science Engineering from The NorthCap University.

Raj: What gave you the idea of pursuing Computer Science Engineering? Was it like everyone else is doing it, so I want to do it or was there a particular reason?

Harmeet: From the beginning of eleventh standard, I have interest in cyber security so that’s why I chose to pursue Computer Science Engineering.

Raj: So, what have you done in the past few years in the cyber security field? Have you done hackathons and stuff?

Harmeet: Not basically hackathons, I have done a few certifications. In my free time, I do freelancing for companies as they require vulnerability assessment and penetration testing for ISO certification.

Raj: So, what recommendations do you have for all the students who are looking to pursue their careers in cyber security and are looking to start their bachelor’s degree now? What would you say they should do?

Harmeet: It is a general belief that if you are in cyber security then you don’t need to be a good coder. But it is a myth. Your coding must be up to the mark. So what I regret is that for the first two year of my college, I didn’t study much and used to roam here and there and spend time with my friends. Therefore, I would recommend that start studying from the beginning, if not regularly but gradually for at least half an hour every day so that your basics must be clear and practice as much as you can.

Raj: Right. So that’s actually a good point to bring up. So let us talk about when you decided to study abroad. What was it that went through your mind and you decided that you wanted to pursue a Master’s degree in the US.

Harmeet: To be honest, I really like studying and want to go into research field. My current college doesn’t provide such opportunities. It is not about studying abroad, I really want to study and that is the biggest motivation I have.

Raj: A master’s degree and do you want to go for a PhD after that?

Harmeet: Yes, definitely.

Raj: So, let us talk about your inclination towards PhD and studying? Have you had much time to spend on research or were you spending more time on getting that practical knowledge and working with companies?

Harmeet: Most of the time I was practicing, recently I have submitted a paper to get published.

Raj: Super! Where are you publishing the paper?

Harmeet: It is International journal of science and research. I had completed the project a while back but I need to hurry up with the submission as the deadline is approaching. I did it today.

Raj: Got it! So you are check off all the boxes that you need to check and I think you are one of the very few students who actually realized early on that wasting time in the freshman year or the first year is not a good idea and you should start working towards whatever you want to pursue. So let's talk about why you want to come to the US specifically and not Canada or other country?

Harmeet: First of all, I believe that the quality of education is much better in the USA and the climate in Canada doesn’t suit me. I feel very cold and so I think I cannot survive in Canada.

Raj: We gotta find you universities on the southern side of USA and not on the north.

Harmeet: Yea, earlier I had thought about applying to universities in Australia as well. My sister is settled over there. But I later decided that education is much better in the USA.

Raj: Yes, atleast the tech side of things is definitely a lot better. So now, was It in the first year or second year that you decided that you wanted to pursue your masters.

Harmeet: Second year.

Raj: What was your thought process? I know you said that you wanted to study. But once you realized that you wanted to do master’s, what was the first step that you took?

Harmeet: I started practicing cyber security since second year but as my sister did an MBA, I was initially inclined towards MBA because the core subjects in my university was not enthralling me. So, I was like, it is not my thing and I will go for an MBA. But with time I developed an interest in technology. Till around April 2019, I was very confused about whether I should go for MBA or Master's in Technology. Finally, I was able to decide that I wanted to do a Master's in Technology and quickly took the GRE with just two months preparation.

Raj: Awesome! Did you take your GER in the third year or the second year itself?

Harmeet: I gave GRE on the first day of the seventh semester.

Raj: I see! I see! OK, so now looking back do you think it was the right move or do you think people should actually take it earlier?

Harmeet: If I get another chance, I will start preparing for it from the second year because verbal is huge. There is no limit to the words you have to memorize and learn their correct usage. You cannot learn words in a single day. If you start early and do two words a day, you end up learning 700 words in a year.

Raj: I think you are absolutely right. Let’s at least tell our viewers what score you have. I will let you do it.

Harmeet: I scored 169 in quants and 155 in verbal.

Raj: That is a score of 324.

Harmeet: Yea

Raj: Awesome! That’s a great score Harmeet. I think we should congratulate you for that. So congratulations! That is definitely a good score. I think we work with a lot of students who are confused about when they should take the GRE and when they should start preparing for their GRE. I am actually glad to hear that in retrospective, if you were given a chance again. You would have taken the GRE or started studying for the GRE in the second year.

Harmeet: Yes.

Raj: We try and tell the students the same thing that the work will take so much time. Because I think quants for students, especially in engineering is not that hard but verbal is.

Harmeet: Being an engineer, I was good at math. So quant was not an issue for me. Issue was verbal.

Raj: Right, it takes forever to actually get through the word list. I think that is the biggest thing. I think if you make a routine and go through the overall process for a longer period of time, the retention actually becomes a lot better.

Harmeet: And you are not under pressure to memorize 50 or a hundred words a day. You just need to do 2 or 3 words a day and that would be sufficient.

Raj: Absolutely! So, you would start preparing in the second year and would you recommend people that they should take their GRE by the end of third year?

Harmeet: Yes, because first of all you need to have some buffer. If for some reason you are not able to get the required score, you should have some time to prepare and take the test again. Plus, once you get the required score you need for GRE, then you can work on your profile and TOEFL and IELTS. Or work on some research project to improve your profile. That is what I believe,

Raj: Totally. I couldn’t agree more Harmeet. You are absolutely saying the right thing. We recommend that to the students as well that taking the test earlier at least gives you a chance if things don’t work out as expected. You have a few more months to take it again and see if anything is going to improve. But in your case, you just studied about two months, took the exam and scored well. So let’s talk about how you went about doing it and then after that we will talk about how you would recommend students to do.

Harmeet: When I started doing it, I was more focused on memorizing the words. I knew that I did not have much time to do 2-3 words a day. And it would be overwhelming for me to do 50- 100 words a day so with time I decided that I will practice more and more questions and will jot down the new words that I come across. Then I would use these new words while speaking and texting. The more I use, the more I will be able to retain them.

Raj: That is a good strategy. Especially when you are in a time crunch that is a very good strategy. What were the resources that you used to prepare for your GRE?

Harmeet: There is an online portal, GREedge.com. I was preparing through them. But when I was nearing the exam date. The last six days, I was giving a mock test every day. I was also practicing Manhattan 5lb books.

Raj: Ok, that is the only thing you used. GreEdge and the Manhattan books. What about the mock tests? Who was providing the mock tests?

Harmeet: Manhattan

Raj: Did you use Manhattan for both quant and verbal or did you use something else?

Harmeet: I downloaded a pdf from google and I gave the mock test.

Raj: Alright. So we have talked about the verbal section. Some engineering students would be comfortable with the quant side and there would be other students who would not be very comfortable with quant. So, how did you go about doing the quant preparation?

Harmeet: I was not doing quant regularly but I used to do 2-3 hrs a week. But when the examination date was near, I used to study for 10 hrs a day so I was atleast doing 4 hrs of quant. So like, I used to jot down the questions I got wrong and revisit them frequently so that it doesn’t get wrong in future.

If I get a chance, I would be focusing more on verbal, so that I can learn words more efficiently. Earlier, I used to jot down the words and revise them frequently but when I am driving or going for a walk, I used to record myself. The word, its meaning and a sentence so that I could get the correct usage. And I used to listen to myself while driving or walking. I think, I should have started earlier.

Raj: Right, So you are saying verbal preparation should have taken a little more focused time and effort but I think your scores are well. So you should not really worry about it too much. But yes, for the students who want to take their GRE, I think it is a good idea to actually start focusing early on because, Quants, I think they can chew on later. So that is not a huge problem.

Now, what was the biggest challenge you had Harmeet when you started thinking about your education in the US? What were the questions that you were trying to answer?

Harmeet: Will I get a good job after completing my master’s or not?

Harmeet: One of my friends’ sister was studying in the US. She was studying very good college and after her graduation she was not able to get a job and she was deported back. It was like she was studying in such a good college but still did not get a job so Will I be able to get a job is a challenging question for me.

Raj: It is very challenging. I would want to talk about this a little. I want to put my two cents into this whole thing.

One, she wasn’t deported back. Deported means USCIS kicks you out. In this case her visa ran out and she decided to come back. Right?

Harmeet: Yes, her visa expired.

Raj: Right, just to technically put it right she wasn’t deported back. Her visa expired and she lawfully decided to come back to her country of origin.

Now, students ask us this a lot and I think it is a general trend that you think that if you get to the best school that your chances of getting a job are just going to go up. And that is not the case. I think when I was at your college, I had said this and I am saying this again that when you are studying internationally you want to make sure that you are spreading your risks as evenly as possible.

A big mistake that students always make is once they get to a university they think everything is great. They finally made it to the school, everything is going to be ok. But I think the biggest challenge actually starts when you get to the campus. Because that is when you need to just focus again because you are in a new country and you do not understand how the systems works here and try and get an internship as quickly as possible. So the law in the US is that if you are coming here for a Master’s degree you need to spend about a year towards the master’s studying here and then you can take an internship. What the students do is, in the first semester they do not focus on internship. Their focus usually is to get good grades and all that stuff. But in a master’s degree getting good grades is not a hard deal. You will be able to get good grades without doing too much. Because you are taking less courses and coming from India especially you are already exposed to talking a lot of courses going through a lot of material every six months. So that should not be a problem.

The problem is always that the students don’t solve is the companies that I should get in touch with to get my first internship and then how do you go about using your OPT. That is the optional practical training that you get right after you graduate.

So getting an internship is the first thing that you should think about as you are getting into your campus. Talk to your seniors, talk to people who come to your campus, and understand if that university is going to help you out to get that first job. So the big names usually, this is I put generally that almost all universities are more focused on their undergraduate students that graduate students because the undergraduate students bring in more money and there is a larger number of them. So they are always focused on getting companies to recruit them.

And there is not enough focus to help graduate students and international students. So usually international students have to scramble on their own to figure things out. So what I would recommend you do is once you get an admit and get to a school, start looking at internship opportunities right as you get to the campus. That is the most important thing. Once you have an internship you at least have the first hook into knowing that you are going to get a job after this. And getting that six months of experience in the US is going to actually get that job.

Now, the second problem that the students have or the mistake that they make is that they look at the top companies always. Because everyone wants to go to the top companies. As an international student, what you should be doing is getting a job that is more important than doing anything else. I will explain why. You get a job, let’s say in Facebook as an engineer for example and let’s say you get a job at XYZ company which is a small to medium size startup in San Francisco or some other part of the US. When you apply for your HI Visa, it is a random process for USCIS to pick up a work visa. They do not give preference to a big company versus a small company. It is a lottery. So everybody takes a dip and randomly they take out 80,000 visas and give those out to people. So what happens is that students start to look at the big companies and the names that they know rather than looking at their network and figuring out if there are smaller companies who are wanting to hire them.

So, when you are looking for your internship, don’t only look for the bigger names, go and look for smaller companies, who will be willing to actually hire you and give you the opportunity to apply for a visa for you H1B and then it’s more of a luck after that. So if you get through, it is great and if you don’t get through then you have two more chances after that. Again, when you start applying to schools your battle doesn’t end getting to the campus, it actually starts after you get to the campus.

So we are now working with students at Purdue and St. Louis University. The cool part about what you have done is that getting a job right after your master’s degree is going to be easier for you because you have experience. That is what students miss out during their bachelor’s degree. Especially computer science students, that they would not spend their time getting some practical experience during those four years. Since you are going for a PhD, your path is going to be a little different. Now your focus will have to be towards research publication and other stuff. Or if you were to get a job, whatever you have done until now or the last two or three years is going to help get a job. So that is a good thing. But it doesn’t help with your master’s admission. That is another myth that I want to break. Student’s think that their experience is going to help them get an admission in the master’s degree and that is not the case. Your experience is going to get you a job after your master’s. So that is why you need to have your experience and that is why it counts. That is something to understand when you are applying to schools.

Raj: So Harmeet, I have asked all the questions that I wanted to ask about. Do you have questions about what you should and should not be doing at this point or when you get to that US, I will be more than happy to answer those.

Harmeet: I just have one question, like what does the universities look for in a candidate? Is it just the GPA and GRE score? What else?

Raj: That is a good question. We would tell this to students and they would not really understand because the universities usually publish all those things on their websites and I personally feel that it is misguidance for students. I think a huge weightage is given to the GRE score. That is the first bot. I will give you a practical reason why that is the case. So let’s assume that you are applying to New York University. And NYU takes in about a 1000 international students every year. Let us just assume that. I don’t know the number on top of my head but that is what it is. Now students start to think that they take 1000 students, we’ll apply and we’ll get through. What they don’t look at is what the acceptance rate is for NYU. So if a 100,000 students are applying to NYU and they accept 1000 students, that is the acceptance rate of 1% and if there is another school and there are 2000 students applying there and they accept 1000 students then their acceptance rate is 50%. But they both are accepting 1000 students. So students are looking at the wrong number. They should be looking at what the acceptance rate looks like. That is number one.

Secondly, when you apply, there are people sitting there to look at your profile. When they get 2000 applications for 20 seats that they have. Their first cut off is the GPA. So if you have a 3.0 GPA and over, you usually match the cut off requirements for all the schools. Now, if you have a lower GPA, which a lot of good students do, the way that will actually make sure that you compensate for the low GPA is to make sure that you get a good GRE score. Because it is a combination of that. So, if a university feels that the GPA is less, they would look at the GRE scores. But these two things take most of the weightage. Now, once you cross that line and let’s say that you are right at the bar where they are saying, “Oh, we don’t know whether we want to accept this student with this GPA or GRE”, that is when your statement of purpose and letters of recommendation makes the impact.

We have talked to multiple students. I have talked to hundreds of students myself. They would come to us and say: ”Oh, we have seen other students getting through just because they wrote a fantastic SOP”, and that is never the case.

So, every profile is a little different and schools are looking for different kinds of people to bring in. And that the problem that we sit in is that we are from India, which is the biggest pool and then you are from computer science which is also the biggest pool. That is where the students make another mistake and they would start looking at the engineering requirements/cut-offs for universities. But engineering cut-offs are so different from Computer Science cut off because computer science is the most competitive field at the moment. If a university requires 323 for engineering, they would require a 325 for computer science because it is more competitive.

Those are the mistakes that students make. But yes, GRE and GPA are the two big things. GPA is the first bar that universities would filter students on and then if you have a good GRE score, it would actually compensate for your low GPA.