What I've Been Doing Instead

Instead of blogging, I have been reading this 6" stack of papers on childhood obesity, nutrition information, etc., and writing up my notes (currently 21 single-spaced pages). I can feel the envy.

Nifty Score Converter

ETS now has a downloadable spreadsheet you can use to predict your GMAT score from your GRE Quantitative and Verbal scores. The motivation behind this appears to be to make it easier for business admissions committees to compare applicants who took the GRE to those who took the GMAT and to give adcoms a sense of what a particular set of GRE scores mean in terms of the familiar GMAT scores. (GMAT is scored as a single number up to a perfect 800; they do provide quantitative and verbal scores and percentiles also, but people usually concentrate on the single number.)

ETS came up with this after looking at the scores of 525 students who took both tests in real testing conditions from 2006-2008. (Students who took the GRE gave permission for ETS to get official score reports from GMAT, I believe.)

My 800-V, 75o-Q results in a predicted 760 GMAT, which is very solid. The highest "average" GMAT score for marketing PhD students in a program that I've seen is the University of Pennsylvania (Wharton) program, whose admitted students had a mean score of 738, and that is most probably the best business PhD program in the world.

Oh, it would appear that a 760 GMAT is 99th percentile. That makes sense; my combined GRE score was in the 99th percentile, too.

Of course, the total GMAT score sort of glosses over the fact that my scores are imbalanced; while the scaled numbers look similar, the percentiles are very different because so many people max out the Quantitative section and only a few score super-high on the Verbal section. I wouldn't care so much about this except for the emphasis that business PhD programs put on the Quantitative score; you want it to be as close to perfect as you possibly can - in the range of 780 - 800, really. I'm just hopeful that since I'm a consumer behavior and not a quantitative marketing applicant that the "low" Q score won't be as important.

I recognize that it looks ridiculous to need to explain away a 1550 GRE score. But the competition really is brutal, and any weakness in one's profile can matter.

I've also noticed, from looking at average GMAT scores published on the various program websites, that the scores of today's successful applicants seem higher than even a few years ago. For example, 2008's admits at Northwestern had an average GMAT of 728, but the number for a couple years ago was 700. That's a move from 92nd to 96th percentile.

I'm trying to educate myself a bit about GMAT scoring, since that's one objective criterion that I can use when comparing my credentials to those of successful applicants at various programs.

Efficiencies of Scale and Scope

I guess the upside of having read 70 articles in the areas of childhood obesity and the use of nutrition information over the last couple weeks is that I am getting good at summarizing the findings fairly quickly. This is a helpful thing, since I am only about halfway through typing up my notes. Fortunately, having done all of the reading before the writing makes it a lot easier to know what parts are relevant, interesting, confirmatory, need explaining, and so forth, since I have this context to evaluate each paper in. I thought I would simply be writing notes, but I am actually drafting sentences and paragraphs for the actual document as I go, which is nice. (Of course, this is going to result in a gargantuan literature review, which will need to be edited for the paper itself, but I like having so much research to hand.)

It's already clear that for some topics, like the effects of TV viewing on obesity, I have an absolute glut of information, while I will need to do additional search for articles on other topics.

Although I don't always want to be doing this work, and it has its tedious aspects (like everything does), there is still a part of me that can't believe I'm being paid to do it as a job. I mean, seriously, I am getting paid, right? I have been reporting the hours, now show me the money. I could use some.

Really though, it has been, dare I say, basically fun? I feel that I am learning a lot about things that I find interesting and developing / honing skills that will prove useful to me for the next 2 - 50 years of my life (depending on how this whole grad school / academia thing works out). And it's keeping me from completely obsessing on the outcome of my current applications and sundry considerations and concerns about the PhD application process. A person might be willing to pay money for something that does that.

Filling a Hole in My Liberal Arts Education

One of the nice things about being on campus for such a long time twice a week is having the opportunity to futz about in the library. University libraries are wonderful things. I have (these 3 semesters I have been at Texas State) usually spent my library time on a combination of homework/textbook-reading/studying for exams for particular classes and independent reading on topics relevant to my grad school research interests. I have read about 15 books on things like consumer psychology, behavioral economics and social psychology, and have dipped generously into about another dozen or so. I feel that I have taken good advantage of my "free" on-campus time getting smarter about things that will matter for me as I continue my specialized education.

But this semester, I finally realized that the library also contains, you know, books a person just might want to read for the sheer fun of it. And when a person takes a special interest in reading the kinds of novels that English professors are likely to assign undergraduates in classes, all the better.

I have not always been a particular fan of Charles Dickens, nor have I read very many of his books; indeed, the only ones I can remember reading are Great Expectations, which I read in junior high, and A Christmas Carol, which I owned, read several times, and like a lot but which, I must admit, has sort of been overshadowed in my mind by the Disney cartoon version (with, for instance, the wonderful floppy duck feet scene that I can watch a dozen times in a row). And of course, I do have a sense of what Oliver Twist is about (due to that unfortunate musical). But having liked so many books written self-consciously in the style of Charles Dickens, it made sense to see how well I liked the real thing, encountering it for the first time as an adult and basically unmediated by exposure to movies based on the novels.

And since somehow, I managed to reach the age of 35 without having read David Copperfield or, more significantly, knowing very much about the story, and since I have enjoyed other coming-of-age stories of that period, I checked it out of the library last week. (Great thing about being technically a graduate student: every book I check out from the library I get to keep for the entire semester.) It's kind of making me crazy wanting to find out what is going to happen; it's useful to recall that before his books were called "classics" and brought out to bore 9th graders, they were stories normal people followed in their serial publication, like the "Lost" of the 19th century. I am reading it with this strangely nuanced perception that I am envious of the future self who will be able to read the book in a more leisurely state of mind because she will already know e.g. exactly what the disturbingly writhing Uriah Heep is up to and that the future self is envious of the fact that the whole story is so new and fresh to me right now.

Pretty Food of Quality

While, apparently, people can disagree as to whether quality food can be "ugly," in the present instance, I maintain that this dish Robert made for me this weekend (for me alone, because he doesn't like turmeric) is both nice to look at and yummy to eat and presents no awkwardness on the "what do we mean by quality" front and - in short, I am just a sucker for one-dish meals in general and I do like this one.



One Dish Chicken and Kielbasa Rice
Cooking Light

2 ½ c. low sodium chicken broth
1/8 t. ground turmeric
1 c. long-grain white rice
7 oz turkey kielbasa, sliced into ½ inch pieces
8 oz skinless boneless chicken thighs, cut into bite-sized pieces
1 chopped onion
1 chopped bell pepper
½ c. frozen peas
40 sliced manzanilla or green olives
1 T. bottled garlic

1. Cook rice with broth and turmeric according to package instructions.
2. Spray dutch oven with olive oil. Over high heat, add chicken; cook 2 minutes or until browned. Add onion and bell pepper; cook 4 minutes or until tender. Stir in peas, olives, and garlic; sauté 1 minute. Add rice and sausage; cook until thoroughly heated, stirring constantly.

Serves 4 at 367 calories per serving.

Davies on Giants

From an essay on opera singer Emma Calve:

"Speaking of herself and her colleagues at the Metropolitan, she said: 'We were a race of giants.' Quite true, and in case you don't know it, being a giant is a very expensive business. The cost of food and drink, not merely for oneself but for one's fellow-giants and one's scores of attendant gnomes, is a very considerable item. And the cost of jewels for a female giant is really fabulous."

Robertson Davies, 1942, in the collection The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies

An Acceptance Of Limited Usefulness

I got an email from Purdue this afternoon that the department is recommending me to the Graduate School for admission, but without funding. This makes it unlikely that I will end up there, unless I don't get funding anywhere, and even then, the middle-of-nowhere location makes it not a great place for Robert to find a job.

I have been reading various places online that this year funding is going to be tight, as universities have been adversely affected by the economic downturn. Some programs are even reducing the number of admits or, in some cases, declining to admit any students at all. (For instance, business departments that will only admit 2 - 3 people per year anyway may just forgo any admits. I have heard of this happening for a few programs, which are not refunding the money of those who applied, but adding them to the pool of applications for Fall 2010, which is not really a substitute.)

Since Purdue has a PhD program in addition to the masters program I applied for, I knew that my funding chances from the department weren't that great to begin with. Of course, it just occurs to me that I will still be in the running for school-wide fellowships sponsored by the Graduate School, but I don't put much hope in that (almost none, really), since many of those are "diversity" fellowships and other scholarships that have specific requirements I am unlikely or certain not to meet.

I am really surprised to be hearing anything from the programs so soon. I had resigned myself to silence on the grad school front until at least mid-February. Exciting.