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Dear All, I am planning to app for MS ECE (solid state/VLSI). My brief profile is : 1) GRE 1510 (Q800, V710, AWA-awaited) 2) GPA 8.28/10; Rank - 4/50; Electronics & Communication from Pantnagar University (Uttrakhand). Oldest and best in region after IIT Roorkee. (not very famous though) 3) 3 Yrs of software work ex with largest Indian IT MNC. Though work has slight touch of research (ie virtualization/distributed systems) but not related with intended field of study. 4) No publication etc. Decent college project. Should get decent recos from manager/profs. And the list of colleges is: University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign University of Michigan–Ann Arbor Georgia Institute of Technology Purdue University–West Lafayette University of Texas–Austin University of Southern California (Viterbi) University of Wisconsin–Madison University of Maryland–College Park Texas A&M University–College Station University of Minnesota–Twin Cities Arizona State University I need to select 8 out of them. Please feel free to say if this list is too ambitious for me. Any comment will be appreciated. Thanks.

Congrats! Oink. I have been reading ur posts in GRE forums. I also finished GRE on Aug 4th and now have TOEFL on 17 Aug. Please let me know what material u referred??

@sandipank thanx. For RCs, Big Book is "the Book" to prepare for. It contains 27 tests * 2 sections * 2 RCs in each section = 108 passages. These RCs are real GRE passges administrated in 90s. They are really good. You need to increase your reading speed little bit but through reading is what it takes in GRE RCs (well, atleast to me) -- though many people use some other tricks such as skimming, reading first and last sentence etc.. Vocab plays decent role in SCs and Anologies too. Please refer Barrons first for vocab to crack these, then you may move to Nova. But most of high scorer say --as per my knowledge-- that Barrons + Big Book is enough for vocab. GRE checks aptitude too in the disguise of anologies and SC. Best wishes.

@vtomar, That time is Okay. But try to reduce it. I used to finish it in 32-33 min. But u r doing quite good. Keep it up. @analog_123 Thanks.. best wishes. :)

Thanks Giddy. @tamsel and vtomar BB 0-3 wrongs in each ie SC, Antonyms, RC. PP 1 790Q, 590 V (2 weeks before the exam) PP 2 790Q, 620 V (3 days before ) PP 3 (just 2-3 questions were repeated) 800 Q, 650 V (2 days before) @grexam ok not a problem, just increase ur pacing. Remembering all the word in the first round itself could be arduous task. I would suggest to proceed to next list even if you can remember 60-70%. BB can be finished in 2 weeks so dont worry much about that, and it requires decent vocab with BB's SC to see the ETS point of view. Therefore, i would suggest u to move fast. Meanwhile you can work on Barrons. Best of luck.

hey grexam, R u trying to rote word list sequentially?? I went through all the list once and identified the words which i didn't know. It gave me confidence to start practicing BB. In starting I made many mistakes but it improved with my vocab. To me mugging all the words then proceed to next list seems very tough as I keep on forgetting. Therefore I advise u to have a look on the all lists. :-) I may be wrong but this is what i did.

Thanks greexam. I roted barron almost all the times except sleeping. :) And contrary to people's advise I brought self made flash pages to exam center to kill my time. :-) But please dont take my advise on this and do whatever is suitable for you. Just before exam, your composure is very important. For Barrons, i marked the words which i didnt't know. Thereafter i keep on narrowing the list using different symbols so that i can save my time by not looking at the words which i already knew. Also, i wasn't 100% confident on Barrons but i knew more than 95% of it.

Hi folks, Couple of hours ago I finished the GRE test. Just wanted to convey my thanks to you guys specially Golddust, Oink, geek_goddess, ekitten and Jeanette. Your GRE experience has been a motivational factor to me. A big thanks to you all. :) To introduce myself, I am an electonics && communaction engineer, from India, with 3 yrs of IT experince. I started GRE prepration 3 weeks ago. During prepration, I refered Barrons, BB, Princeton and Nova. In softwares i used Powerprep, Kaplan and Barrons. I quite agree with Golddust's evaluation of these materials. Please see his post. My AWA and Verbal section went unceremoniously but I was stumped by Quant. I was confident (read: over-confident) on my math skills therefore i did only little practice. But it came back to me as havoc in exam and i was running out of time. Therefore, my sincere advice to all -- specially engineers and math background guys-- is to practice maths appropriately. :-) Thanks again.