Sorry for the recent lack of photos and content generally. In addition to full-time work and three hours a day spent commuting, I am working on job applications, apartment hunting, preparing applications to doctoral programs, and getting ready to write the GRE ASAP.
Despite the many highly valid objections against doctoral programs, they are looking like my best option at the moment.
[Update: 10:32pm] If you want to read something much more interesting than my blog, I suggest T.E. Lawrence’s book about trying to join the RAF incognito after his famous Arabian adventures. The whole thing is available for free online, in two versions. There is one with curse words, and one for those with delicate ears. It’s remarkably modest for a book about a military hero. Right out the outset, he gets embarrassed by a doctor noticing that he has been too poor to eat well during the past few months.
It has been quite a while since I wrote a standardized test of this kind. I wrote the SATs when I was 17 and the LSAT when I was about 18 or 19.
(Aside: As noted in the version of my resume from 2004, I got 1450 on the 2001 SAT (770 verbal, 680 math) and a score of 164 on the 2002 LSAT. My 2004 resume also includes among my accomplishments: “Olympic Athletic Club – Juice Bar Attendant” and “Pharmasave – Cashier”.)
Some of my UBC exams were comparable to the GRE – especially multiple choice tests in statistics and calculus. All my Oxford exams were essay-based. It will be odd to go back to spending evenings and lunch hours doing multiple-choice practice exams.
In the good company of Kaplan?
Kaplan’s New GRE 2011-2012 Premier with CD-ROM!
It’s stressful and a touch dehumanizing to have to prepare my brain so that various schools can decide if I am intelligent enough to be admitted.
Don’t worry about it too much! Most schools state that they place very little value on GRE scores. And we all know you’ll do exceptionally well anyway.
Also, don’t you think the reading comprehension is kind of fun? I thought so anyway..
I am preparing Jenny for the SAT’s and the grammar is really easy. The comprehension part will be really easy for you in the GRE’s. I am sure that you will do great as you have a very logical and clear mind.
In a way, I see doing a doctorate as gaining a useful platform from which I can do other things. The academic environment would be well-suited to collaboration and political advocacy, and it would provide a useful institutional structure.
Rather than having a day job that is a distraction from my major areas of interest, it seems like it could be a route to devoting much more of my attention to climate matters.
Oddly, being in an academic environment would probably leave me more free commercially as well, to undertake things like advertising on my websites and commercial photography without any concern about potential or apparent conflicts of interest. That could partly offset the reduced income associated with a student life.