I’ll be applying to doctoral programs this fall. I’m doing my undergraduate degree at an okay institution (tier 3, but I went there because there was faculty I wanted to do research with.) I have a 3.88 GPA, double major in computer science and psychology, honors everything, graduating a year early, and have worked on 10 separate research projects, 4 of which I designed myself. I also have a first-author journal paper, 2 co-author journal papers, 2 first-author conference papers, 3 co-authored conference papers, and 6 first-author poster papers. I’ve also served on organizing committees for academic conferences, been asked to peer-review papers, have presented talks at academic conferences, written small grants which were accepted, and have won multiple student research competition awards. However, despite all of this, my ability to do middle school math is embarrassing. I haven’t taken the GREs yet, but on my practices, I’ve scored around a 450. I’m confident about my ability to do well on the verbal and writing portions, but am worried about my quantitative score. I believe my research background indicates that I’m clearly capable of doing independent research, but I’m worried that the admissions committee won’t even open up my CV because they’ll only see a moderately low GRE score from a non-prestigious university.
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