GRE/MFE help required

[gtinside]

Hi everyone ,

I am bit confused and hence need advice . I have around 5.3 yrs of experience as business analyst and solutions developer. I have been working on trading infrastructure since last 3.5 yrs. I am a FRM charter holder and CFA Level 3 candidate. I am interested in pursuing MFE or MS Financial Mathematics from an Ivy League. Following are my questions :

1) I haven't started preparing for GRE yet, am I too late for Fall 2011 admissions

2) Am I too old for a MS program

3) How long wud it take to prepare for GRE and finish off the complete application process. I am aiming for Columbia and Stanford

Please do advice me, appreciate your help

Regards,
Gaurav

 

[Andy Nguyen]

1) Admission is currently open till as late as May next year
2) old is relative. impossible to tell. Are you 30 or 50?
3) Depends. i took me one week to prep for GRE and 3 weeks for the application (i applied to only 1 program).

Columbia and Stanford have their own admission procedure and requirement. you need to look at it and prepare accordingly.

 

[Connor]

1) No, for example Stanford's deadline is Dec 7 and I believe other programs are later than that.

2) No, but you didn't tell us your age either.

3) Next GRE test dates are Oct 23 and Nov 20. How long it will take to prepare for the GRE depends on your current knowledge and ability plus how much time and effort you put into studying.

 

[achilles]

hi Gaurav

You can still safely prepare for fall 2011 admission , though I think u won't be able to make it for R1 deadlines. You can safely apply for further rounds.

GRE prep would take you around 3 months if you start from scratch. Though, if you already are acquainted with most of the words, if wud take much lesser time

 

[latency]

why are you not targeting schools like cmu/haas/ucla. They are also good schools and accept the gmat. the gmat is easier than the gre. you should be ready in less than a month for the gmat.

 

[Lyosha]

GRE prep took me about two hours the first time, and about an hour the second time. I did pretty well. The amount of time it takes to prepare is largely dependent on you though - you may not need to prepare at all if you are confident enough in your abilities, but if you've never taken a standardized test some practice might be in order (doing practice tests is consequently the best way to prepare in my opinion...).

 

[APalley]

GRE really depends on your background. With a relatively strong mathematics background, you should be able to ace the quant section with minimal to no study time. The verbal is harder to say; however, your score on the verbal sections are not nearly as important as quantitative.

 

[Yike Lu]

If you are a "typical" MFE candidate, GRE quant prep should take you a few hours max (half of it just familiarizing yourself with the test).

Verbal
1) Is far less relevant than Quant. Many of the words you will never encounter again.
2) Takes a long time to prepare for if you don't have a habit of reading books with a lot of fancy but obsolete words. It's the sheer volume of vocabulary and the difficulty of becoming truly familiar with it. I'm no slacker when it comes to the English language, but GRE verbal gave me a headache. This could take months to a year to bring up.

Analytical
1) Probably takes a month to get grammatical mechanics down if you're not already familiar with them.
2) If you're a good writer, you're a good writer. If you're a bad writer... you'll likely stay a bad writer unless you seriously commit to learning the craft (something that can take years).
3) The logical part of the analytical writing should take a week or less to prepare for and is actually highly relevant. You just have to get used to spotting logical fallacies.

But are those last two sections really that relevant? It's not worth losing sleep over if your MFE deadlines are coming up.

 

[coolharvard]

1) Admission is currently open till as late as May next year
2) old is relative. impossible to tell. Are you 30 or 50?
3) Depends. i took me one week to prep for GRE and 3 weeks for the application (i applied to only 1 program).

Columbia and Stanford have their own admission procedure and requirement. you need to look at it and prepare accordingly.

Which school/program did you apply to?

 

[Lyosha]

Analytical section for me was buying a review book and memorizing the essay formula that they used for their examples of essays that got a 6 (perfect score). Took about 10 minutes and got me a 5 on that part of the test. Writing essays is all about finding a formula that sounds nice, makes sense and, most importantly, is the one that the graders are looking for. Once you know the formula it's just a matter of plugging in values GRE test makes supply you with.

One other hint is that always stick to your formula, whatever it may be. Even if that means you have to argue against saving the whales and feeding hungry kids in Africa - GRE graders don't care about your morality, they care about cohesiveness of your arguments. And your arguments are most cohesive when a part of your formula

 

[KPatelMiami]

Advice

Hey Gaurav,

You are certainly not to old to apply for an MS degree, i am am not sure specifically about Stanford and Columbia, but i do know with that a lot of programs - for example the MFE degree at Berkeley, the average is over 25 ( i think about 26 or 27).

Also in agreement with everyone else, you certainly still have a lot of time to well on your GRE. I spent about a month studying - 3 weeks for verbal, and about a week for math and analytical and i ended up with

780 - quant
620 - verbal
5 - analytical

so it is definitely possible !
I recommended the books published by NOVA - i looked at those along, with a Barrons and a Kaplan book, and i think the material published by NOVA is considerably more exhaustive than the others, and prepares you for questions harder than the actual GRE test, so it makes taking the test a lot easier !

Hope that this Helps.

Best,

Kalpesh