Okay, so I might have a little bit of a chip on my shoulder, but seriously the GRE isn’t just a grown-up SAT. As you might have heard, it’s a Computer-Adaptive Test, which means that you take it on the computer (if you’re hankerin’ for fill-in-the-bubble test, they still do that for the Subject GREs) and that each quesiton you answer determines what the next question will be. Get one right, get a harder question. Get one wrong, get an easier question. While this may seem like a good idea, in fact it means that first 5 or so questions determine the broad range of your score and if you don’t perform well near the beginning you can never truly recover. Also, because each question depends on the answer to the previous one, you can’t skip questions and come back to them later. If you hit one you don’t know, you must either waste precious time or guess. One last thing that I personally don’t like about the test because it doesn’t play to my strengths but may not be a problem for you, is that the Quantitative section isn’t at all about solving math problems like you would encounter on any normal test. No, it’s a “reasoning test” which means you’re supposed to use concepts like knowing a negative times a negative equals a positive to solve the answer rather than just straight out doing the math. I am much, much better at plugging away and getting an answer than finding the “trick” I must use, but the time allotted for the section doesn’t allow for spending multiple minutes finding the solution.

Anyway, all this is not to say that you won’t do well, but just be aware that the GRE is different from other standardized tests. I would suggest picking up a Kaplan or Princeton Review book to help familiarize yourself with the test’s quirks. Just my $0.02.

Rory has his undergraduate degree in CS and worked hard to try and figure out what to do next before moving on to the ITP program at NYU. Please please please come over some time and pick his brain. He’d be happy to share his experience with you! He’s busy, so I can help coordinate if you guys want to talk. Maybe a drawing night or dinner some night would be good timing?

Check out Rory’s web site for an idea of what he likes to do, because I would love to tell you about it but I seem incapable of articulating every time I try.
http://prize-pony.com/

Thanks for coming to our party this weekend. It was fun to finally have you guys over.

–Em

The software engineering classes I took in college weren’t that helpful in retrospect, as I don’t believe that the classroom setting can accurately emulate the environment of a real software development shop. Semester long schedules, short projects and new code with every class runs completely contrary to the realities of a software development shop: legacy code, confused users, system quirks, live system requirements, year long projects, pointy haired bosses, etc etc.

Computer Science is, IMO, a better match for the academic world, since it is essentially an offshoot of mathematics. College is pretty much the only place that you’ll encounter the course work to prepare you for debugging really tricky problems, figuring out recursion and doing a bunch of cool stuff with lambda calculus etc.

If you want to get a feel for the differences between CS and SE, I would recommend reading a couple of books, for Software Engineering:

The Mythical Man-Month
Code Complete

for Computer Science:

Introduction to Algorithms

These are pretty much the defacto computer software books. In fact, if you “get” everything in Intro to Algorithms, you’ll probably be ready for a job at Google!

let the earth stop rotating, it’s awesome that your interests have evolved and you are open and willing to get the learnings you fancy by exploring all these options. we’re rooting for you! and now to ogle your moleskines…lovejojo

p.s. obvi every day i am so impressed w. the people our circle have evolved into (being) it makes me pretty stoked