GRE-at Expectations

This is an article I wrote for the recently published edition of my college newspaper "Vox Populi" which currently has me as one of its editors. I thought it would be interesting to share it with other people too... so here it is:

The first two years in this college are sheer bliss. All you know are instances of illustrious seniors lapping up prestigious jobs with mind-boggling pay-packages. Enter third year, and the harsh realities begin to surface. You realise that not everything is as rosy as it seemed to be.

In the last year or so, the economic downturn has just made things worse. The hordes of third-years lining up for placement preparation sessions and the so-called “personality-enhancing workshops” bewilder me. These “troubled times” have also got people thinking about continuing their education and avoid the messed-up placement scenario altogether. This has led to something which I would like to the call ‘the GRE phenomenon’.

Suddenly, everybody is queuing up for the hitherto little-known and “not so happening” city of Allahabad (oddly, one of the two centres for GRE in the north). People who, till yesterday, swore that they would die rather than continue in their current field of study are cramming thousands of words, only to pursue “higher” education in their respective fields. Every place you go, you find people racking their brains over a list of ‘alien’ words and strategizing for the test on war footing. Only, this war has a different kind of ‘Barron’ as its indisputable hero.

These GRE ‘maggus’ are becoming a pain for the other half of their peers, the GRE “muggles”. These innocuous beings are made to brook their ubiquitous “Barron’s”-wielding cronies’ persistent rambling in an array of stilted words. You definitely understand what I intend to convey, don’t you? I mean what were these people thinking when they designed this test. Someone must have said, “Hey! Here is a list of some really nasty and useless words you need to mug up. If you’re ready to do that, you must be really desperate to get to the US and we’ll let you in”.

It is common to see students stashing some “not-so-flashy” flash cards (for the uninitiated, these are word-meaning lists) inside their notebooks, and anxiously taking a peek at them when the professor looks away. So ugly is the rat-race that it has gulped up some totally clueless “muggles” who, realising that their friends were into GRE, have begun vigorous efforts to increase their vocabulary, just so that they are not left behind in any way.

Joining the rats in this race for a successful career are the CATs. They were recently seen to be at the peak of their activity when they were remarkably stumped by an apparently confusing form to be filled, merely to register for the Common Admission Test, which, actually, should have been the puzzling part.

Well, in the fact that all this preparation leads to people joining hands to improve upon their skills and aim for a better future, there is a beauty in this mess. But, as they say, pulchritude has cutaneous profundity... – “beauty is skin deep”, yaar!