Grawr! GREs

I missed my chance to register for the CS GRE subject test date in November, which means I can’t take it until December, which means the results probably will not be available in time for my Churchill Scholarship application.

I can’t think 6 weeks in advance. A week lead time seems like a huge amount. You only need two days to register for the GRE computer-based tests. I don’t feel like I have time to function that far ahead of schedule. I had tried to register twice before, several weeks ago, but the site was b0rk3n.

Of course, I promptly forgot to keep checking to see if I could register. I obviously needed to set up a regular reminder for myself that wasn’t just whenever Fritz and I talked about it. I thought I was all on top of things when I took care of getting my application materials from the fellowships office two weeks ago.

Dammit, I feel like an idiot. Hopefully Joanna N. in the fellowships office will have some helpful advice.


Comments

6 responses to “Grawr! GREs”

  1. Man, that sucks. :>( Good luck getting it sorted out.

    As far as i’m concerned, this is the number one big win of my ticketing system setup — i can say right now, “start reminding me in February to do something about Passover, which is in April, and make the deadline for doing that, i dunno, March?” That’s not so much the technology as how i use it (the ticketing system does other things, and i use those too). But it should be pretty easy to have a three column flat file DB:

      <nag starting> <due date> <item description>
    

    that would e-mail you every day if there were any items whose nag range you were in. This is effectively what i do with birthdays, and it’s a pretty short script.

  2. FYI: http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/001379.html

    Biomimicry, robots… dunno, your kinda thing? (From a blog I subscribe to on my other friends page, not the usual one)

  3. I use iCal, which is sufficient for my purposes. The problem is that I need a reminder to put stuff in there ;o).

    I really only need to remind myself of the long term stuff. I’m so used to functioning on Swat’s short timescale that I’ve adapted to a very roll-with-the-punches mentality.

    The fact that it takes 6 weeks to process information I enter in an online form is pretty ludicrous. I know I’m engaging in transference here, but for their own computer-based tests they only need a 2-day lead time. I realize that that exam is being handled completely electronically, but you’d think that ETS would be able to use a similar database to speed up their processing of the other exams. More to the point, if they’ve got this great system in place, why not migrate all of their exams to it? It’d just be a matter of a little bit of data entry to create the computer exams, since the facilities, software, and procedures are all already in place.

  4. some scholarships will accept test scores or other supplementary material after the general application deadline. it’s worth checking.

    also, i thought i remembered the GRE having some kind of standby policy, although it may have been for the general tests, or i may just be completely misremembering.

    anyway, good luck.

  5. The LSAT has a similar register-way-in-advance policy, though “way” is only 4 weeks in that instance. Still, it nearly tripped me up; I’d been planning to take the October 2nd LSAT since oh, May or so, but completely forgot the specifics of registration until the last week of August, when I looked them up again and was quite surprised (and relieved that I was just in time)….

    I don’t understand the long lead times these days, either.

    Entering stuff into iCal is my biggest problem. I sort of cope by having a lot of stickies on my desktop, because it’s much easier to enter notes on a stickie, and then even if I don’t immediately (or ever) transfer them into iCal, they’re still sitting there. Except for when they get covered by other stickies…. :-)

  6. I’d imagine the lead time has something to do with making sure test centers are at least slightly optimized as to the number of people there and also to be sure all the booklets can be printed in time.

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