GRE
Unofficial scores:
Verbal: 770
Quantitative: 730
Proving once again I am a master of wordcraft. Also, considering that I haven't had a math course in three full years, not too bad on that front.
Verbal: 770
Quantitative: 730
Proving once again I am a master of wordcraft. Also, considering that I haven't had a math course in three full years, not too bad on that front.
posted by Derek at 7:09 PM
6 Comments:
I take it those are good scores? I never took the GRE. Congratulations, just in case. Is it time for grad school for you? If so, where?
The scores are on a scale of 200-800. The quantitative is typically said to be way too easy, and the verbal way too hard. So, my quantitative score is quite good all things considered, and my verbal score remarkable.
I just found something that might give an idea. According to Purdue's website, for entering phil. grad students the average verbal score is 589 (to my 770), with that being the highest average of any departments. For quantitative it is 636 to my 730, with phil. being 15th in the rankings of average scores. The top is physics with 738, just 8 points above my actual. For Princeton it was 678 verbal/673 quantitative. For analytical writing, which I will not get results from for two weeks, philosophy at Purdue is at the top with 5.1 out of 6, and to be frank, if I get anything less than 5.5 (the next to highest possible score, since actual scores are in .5 increments) I will be furious. As for total average scores, the first result I found was for 1999-2000, during which the overall average verbal was 465 and quantitative was 578. So in fact, I find that I did not just good but awesome. Fanfare for me!
Graduate school...I'm looking at schools that have specialty programs in Continental philosophy (that end of philosophy opposite the one you typically study, sid), especially Nietzsche, as well as programs that have a strong focus on teaching, since I really want to be a lecturer more than an author (the odds of this actually happening are low, low, low, but if that were enough to stop me I wouldn't have gone into Continental philosophy in the first place). Duquesne, Marquette, Fordham, and Vanderbilt are my current choices, although it tends to shift as I find new information. I just want to find a place that'll put up with me for five years. Hopefully by the early next year I will have a place to go, and with my GRE scores where they are, it's not looking to impossible anymore :)
Wow, congratulations then. I'm sure you'll have success wherever you end up going. I'm not just saying that either. I think you will for two reasons: passion and ability. You have a passion for philosophy, that is clear. That'll keep you motivated despite circumstances. Your writing on this blog and your GRE scores are testaments to your ability.
Eventually I'll get myself back into education. My goal is to teach upper-division mathematics. Calculus is as about as simple as I'd like to teach. The problem is finding a teaching-oriented mathematics PhD program. With my masters in applied math, academia kept pushing me towards research, which I despise.
Then you understand my boat perfectly (rant time). "Publish or perish" actually angers me to a degree. To me it takes much of the purpose out of philosophy, especially in the particular area I am trying to enter, and I think it is a major, if not the major, reason that philosophy is by and large ignored. Frankly I don't care about tiny modifications to the coherence theory of truth, and not many do outside of faculties. While it would be wrong to say that making the minor criticisms and modifications you find throughout philosophy journals is unimportant (it is of course necessary to arrive at better theories), the field should be more than this. Thousands of articles are published yearly, and how many will even the most ardent specialist read? And with too many researchers looking at lecturing as drudgery, no wonder many students don't care. There are no more sages in philosophy, just men with intellectual microscopes that leave your eyes blurry and hurting.
I really could go on and on. As you can see, my goal is to go into a classroom and change people's lives through thinking, not just demonstrate things. It gives me a feeling of...almost awe whenever I make someone challenge an old prejudice. Hopefully I can find the right place to let me do this. I know those positions are still out there, they just have to be discovered.
I wish you luck as well. A passionate teacher makes any subject worthwhile, since he or she shows the student what the subject can really do. I could see a truly devoted mathematician showing the grace in a grand proof, and when I have the patience for math myself seeing the answer to a challenging answer reveal itself to me is always a feeling of victory. I myself could never click with math, but I think that might be because I don't have the patience to get to the good (i.e. theoretical) stuff. One just has to keep at it.
It's nice to know that math isn't the only field suffering from over-publication.
When I did teach math, I didn't stay within topic all the time. Many of the great mathematicians were also great philosophers. I'd often start a new topic with a digression into the philosophy of, say, Descartes.
It was so much fun.
I'm fortunate enough to be at a school right now where the professors don't have much of a publishing requirement, and it's great. The professors are willing to just talk philosophy once in a while, and they always have time after class. It's not easy to find places like that anymore, though, except liberal arts colleges and smaller schools. Those are presumptive targets of mine after grad school.
As bad as philosophy is for this kind of mindset, I imagine math would be even worse. The further from the humanities you go, the more intense the publishing obsession appears to be. To a degree I understand; you need a way to distinguish the top from the rest. But when that's the only motivating force, the education itself suffers.
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