Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by TheTrotters 1584 days ago
This may be true for lower-tier and middle-of-the-pack graduate programs but at the higher end, if anything, the opposite is true. There's an arms race among the candidates to get the best grades in the hardest classes, to get the best research experience, best letters of recommendations, perfect or near-perfect GRE scores and often GRE subject scores.

Getting a good job sounds almost blissfully easy in comparison.
2 comments
shihab 1584 days ago
A little nitpicking about GRE, it really doesn't seem to matter anymore. There is a wave of schools making it optional, and often outright banning it from submission.

Anecdotally, I have a near perfect-perfect GRE score (334/340, perfect score in quantitative), with at least avg position on other criteria (I think). I failed to get even interviews in many mid-tier US universities last year.

link
throwaway0a5e 1583 days ago
A member of my family got a "you know the only thing you can do with this is teach, right?" undergrad degree from a prestigious liberal arts school. And then she followed it up with a master's at a prestigious school. And now she's a teacher. Thankfully she didn't go into debt over it.

Yes, I know it's just an anecdote.

link