Grad School and the GRE: Where are we gonna go?

  

This Friday, Matt and I are both taking the GRE (insert insanity here). Our mental health aside, we are both really excited to be done studying. Remember high school geometry? As a political science major, I definitely don't. Well, it's covered on the GRE. The plus for me is that there is a verbal section. Hallelujah. Sentence completion, editing, and reading comprehension? Sign me up!

Anyway, we have been preparing for a while now and the time has finally come to take the GRE and find out where we can apply. Both of us are currently planning on PhDs in our respective fields. Matt: Bioengineering. Jessica: Political Science. We are both assuming we can get into a few top 25 programs. Hopefully! Surprisingly, bioengineering and political science doctoral programs have good overlap. Let's look at the possibilities:

School	Rank for Bioengineering	Rank for Political Science
MIT	1	10
Stanford	2	3
UC--Berkeley	3	6
U of Illinois--Urbana	5	22
U of Texas at Austin	8	23
U of Michigan	9	4
Cornell	10	20
Texas A&M	13	24
UC—Los Angeles	14	11
UC—San Diego	15	8
Columbia	16	7
UW—Madison	17	16
Harvard	18	1
Northwestern	19	21

Look at all those options! Awesome! We have 14 schools in the top 25 of our fields that overlap. We are SO lucky. Matt doesn't like the idea of living in the midwest. He says the thing he hates the most about Utah is the eternal winter. Since I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin (notice it has one of the top schools!), I have fond memories of snow forts and snow days, so we'll have to see. Besides, four of the schools up there are in the midwest. Oh well. On the upside, four schools are in California! It would be totally cool to live in California. I would be sunbathing every single day. We'd also be close to extended family there, which would be really nice. Matt says we apply to every single overlap school and see what happens. Bring it on!