What was your SAT/GRE/MCAT/LSAT/GMAT/etc score?

Hmm, funny, almost everybody I know has a bachelors degree at best, and they've bought their own houses. I've got a good house, and my wife works part-time, if you can call it that. The problem now is tuition has been increasing above salary for so long that graduates are coming out with much higher debt loads than they used to.

In my line of work (software engineering) we usually shy away from the people with PhD's because their coding skills are often horrendous. They might be book smart, but they definitely can't put it into practice or communicate well with colleagues. And pay is usually aligned more with experience on the job than it is with degrees. Where I've been, if you finish a degree by taking evening classes, you don't get a guaranteed pay increase. You may never get a pay raise because of your degree (beyond a bachelors), for an engineer. Management is different, pure research positions might be different. Obviously being a professor at college requires advanced degrees.

An MBA from the right university still has value with many companies, but you pay dearly for those. Kellogg, Purdue, etc.

 

Good Lord, that was 46 years ago. I can't remember yesterday and have probably forgotten more than I know!

 

i've got about 2 years of post-PhD experience in multiple job sectors. i have a quality educational pedigree, but graduated into a craptastic job market (actually, both times). my take is this:

1. pedigree matters not for the name recognition on the CV, but for the networking connections. i cannot TELL you how many times just in the last few years i've gone to initiate a conversation/make a contact/chat at a conference/whatever and had the small-world effect show up simply because of where i've spent time. this opens doors, like it or not. particularly when you've worked with a well-respected mentor.

2. ranked programs do get recognition for being more rigorous and turning out better graduates. this applies only to grad school, in my experience. the unstated understanding is that if graduates can make it through the crap thrown at them by those programs, they pretty much have learned to be unsinkable.

3. more education does not guarantee more income. an average PhD grad out of the gate will take several years to catch up to an average MS grad in my field. ~2 years after graduating, a handful of my cohort are still living with relatives, unable to afford their own studio apartment on their income. and really, the PhD has utility in a very narrow range of applications. my field is overproducing PhDs (as are many) so competition can be tight.

4. bottom line is you are the interaction of your own ambition x the environments availed to you. no main effect of either. (stats geeks, i'm looking at you.) both will account for success, along with extraneous factors.

these are things you need to know going in. i say them not to be discouraging, but because i wish someone had told me some straight facts rather than the grad-school sales pitch. know what you're getting into and realistically what you'll get in return. that said, i really enjoy what i do for a living, and though the road was very hard, i am glad i did it.

since you asked. my ACT score was a 34 or 35 and my GRE was 1300something. i'd have to go back and look, but i do remember sweating alcohol both times... that's my standardized-test routine. (some may call it state-dependent learning, some may call it attempted self-sabotage. meh.)

 

I had a GPA of 4.0 for the first two years of college, but it was somewhat less than that after the next three years of University. Not being educated in the US, I never took any of the tests listed in the thread's title, though I recall scoring a grade 11 level of reading comprehension when I was in grade 4. Little brainiac that I was, I used to be really upset when I got one wrong on a math test.

Most of my peers make considerably more money than I do, but none of them that I know of have achieved such a favourable life/work balance, nor do they have as good a relationship with their kids. Some things are worth more than money - love and time to play are among them.

 

I would disagree on the idea that more degrees are good things. I know it's all the rage these days to say so, but hold on...

I have a bachelor's, that's it, and I'll admit I spend way less than 99% of people out there, but I'm just fine.

If you can stand to build yourself as a self-employed fellow, it's a pain, takes several years at least, and may not be possible in every sector, but if it works out, it's not bad. There's no one skimming off the top. Imagine everything your company bills for your work going directly to you, for example. It equates to working significantly fewer hours per week making the same as someone doing the same for a company. Plus everyone will know the quality of your product after awhile and turn to you first.

Many downsides, but those are the ups.

1490 on SATs, 780 on the math portion.

 

there's been a bubble in degree production for over a decade, frankly. it's ongoing in myriad fields. the crapper economy is driving young folks who can't find jobs in their early (and sometimes mid) career back to school. science/math/technology, particularly biomedical science, is a poster child, but anyone who expects to teach at the tenure-track professor level is going to be in for a tooth-and-nail fight for a job in the majority of cases, regardless of discipline.

i'd recommend you read up carefully on the state of your chosen field. like i said, really know what you're getting into and what you can expect on the other side. it's not something to enter in lightly, especially in this climate.

 

i'm a pharmacologist.

 

579 on the GMAT. Graduated 21 years ago. Recovered tuition costs within 4 to 5 years over other co-workers. Entered management upon graduation.

BTW, I'm not sure how anyone can value a graduate program unless they've been through it.

 

Physics was way overproduced in the 90s, just like most fields. Actually, there was a PhD bubble in all fields in the late 90s. I made the mistake of listening to some jerk talk about Baby Boomer demographics and retiring scientists when I was young, so I went to grad school for physics.

Halfway through my particle physics degree, the SuperCollider was cancelled, and the Iron Curtain fell. I looked around the department, and saw that 1/3 of faculty were over 65 -- they weren't retiring! All of the sudden, the field was swarming with people who were on their second or third postdocs, as well as the best of the best from eastern Europe, who worked twice as hard for half as much. Then in '99, just months into what was shaping to be a 3-5 year postdoc, I was reading about all these guys in quantitative finance that had physics degrees, so I bailed out of a dead-end field, made some money working for a hedge fund, then saw that evaporate in the aftermath of Lehman Brothers and Madoff. I'm having lots of fun messing around with the Prius and Insight right now, but soon I'll have to grow up again and figure out a way to make a living, not in physics, not in finance.

Don't chase the hot fields.

Having a PhD can be a blessing or a curse when it comes to finding work. I agree that most PhDs can't write good code. I sure can't. I'd rather tell someone else, "This is how you would solve the problem, now go write the bullet-proof code and put it into production."

If you pursue a graduate degree, whether it be MBA or PhD, go to a top 20 school in that field. Make sure your thesis advisor is well known in the field if you want to be an academic.

 

Got a 1480 on the SAT (Out of 1600 "back in the day" before the composition section was added). 780/800 where it counts (math/science).

Degrees are only what you make of them. In my field, if you have a phd, you know what you are talking about. Everyone must become specialized because it is just physically impossible to understand it all in all depths. It will only get worse as technology makes further leaps. You can't just leap ahead to the new stuff, you have to build up a background from the beginning. Right about now there are universities skipping over TTL logic or basics and heading right into microcontrollers and FPGAs. All fine and dandy but you need to know the basics to make good use out of the tools of today.

If you get a phd in the fiber weaving of north amazonian tribe people, I don't think it is going to really matter much in the grand scheme of things.

I am amazed at some of the high scores here. I bought an SAT prep book, and I think I read a couple pages and never picked it up again. I never gave school my all because I was busy inventing and tinkering. Actually using the methods taught versus doing the homework assigned. The gamble paid off, as I graduated with a low GPA, high honours, professor recommendations, and got a job at the best company in my field.

 

When did the main SAT have a science section? Mine, long before the composition was added, had only math and verbal.

Mine was also before the 1995 renormalizing of the scale, which substantially boosted many scores.

 

Mine was post 95, pre 2006/2007ish that they added the writing.

As for science, the SATI doesn't include science, but SATII (the specific subject test) does. As do the ACT tests. I think I took that 3rd year of highschool, but I don't remember the score.

I had to take SATI (Math Level 1 and English "Comprehension" I believe), SAT Math Level 2, and SAT Physics. Then also took the pSATs and ACT and PLAN tests throughout highschool...

My university did not credit me for my scores with the SATII tests (policy), but they did credit me for my AP Math BC credit and AP Physics credit.

 

SAT (1999):
760 Math
300 something Verbal

GRE (2002):
740 Math
700 something Analytical
300 something Verbal

 

Maybe there was a PhD bubble, but there was (and is) a definite lack of bachelors of science. We were importing large numbers of immigrants for jobs and to our schools. My graduating class was probably 1/3 Asian, and this was a relatively small school in northern MN, not a big draw for people from warmer climates.

Do what you enjoy, or work will always be a chore. Trouble is, at 18 or 22 you quite often don't know all the options and what you like the most. And getting a degree is a long process, so changing careers is not all that easy. Glad to see you were able to do that though.

I was referring to people with a PhD in Computer Science actually. They spend their time with esoteric compiler optimizations or fancy filters for signal processing, etc, but not with debugging multitasking code or simply writing for code re-use. I work in the embedded world, and code efficiency and maintanability is paramount.

I wouldn't expect someone outside of computer science/software engineering to write good code, but actually many do. There are several ways to learn it on your own, if that's your cup of tea.

I think my objection to getting an advanced degree (for improving your salary) is that the same amount of time with real-world experience will increase your starting salary just as much or more, plus less tuition to pay off. But that depends considerably on the field in question.

When I started in this field, many of the old-timers didn't have a college degree, but it was quickly becoming a requirement for open positions. I thought by the time I became an old-timer, a masters would be a standard requirement, but I don't really see that happening.

 

The other thing - I worked hard to get a cum laude - I was right on the bubble all the way to the end, so I couldn't let up even for my last finals. I'm kinda glad I got that, but it was probably only mentioned on my first job interview, along with the GPA, and for jobs after that people don't care about your college grades. Only what you have real experience with. Now if you're below 3.0 that might be a caution flag to potential employers, and there's a couple persnickety companies out there (EDS for instance) that eliminate people based on GPA, but I wouldn't want to work for them anyway.

I'm not saying party and ignore your grades, but getting a coop or intern experience is more important than a top-notch GPA and probably better than a masters for getting an entry level engineering job. Just my perspective. We need people with masters and PhD's too, but you need to know why you're doing it.

 

I think this is the main reason you can't generalize about there being a set prescription to being a success. MBAs especially. I know a few people who got MBAs from Harvard....some many years ago and some more recently. None of them are movers and shakers in the business world. There's also many top income earners who dropped out of college (or even a couple who dropped out of high school) in order to pursue a real lead. I also know a few folks who are life long students and are going for a second phd/md. Especially with this economy, there's some amount of what education/background you have...but then there's also what kind of networking you've done and how well you've marketed yourself.