<p>So I'm interested in the labor studies and employee relations program at rutgers and I did fairly badly on my gres, got a 490 on verbal and a 510 in quantitative and a 4 on my essay.</p>
<p>my overall gpa is 3.0 and I have no research experience, though I've been working a while as an assistant HR manager.</p>
<p>have solid recommendation letters as well. </p>
<p>do I have a chance at all?</p>
<p>Depend on what school</p>
<p>But in general, your GPA barely made it to average cutoff of many school, so your GRE needs to be strong to offset the GPA. Especially with no research exp (although what is “working a while”? 1 year? 2 years?)</p>
<p>I guess in the program you mentioned, you will need a decent quant with stronger verbal. If you can manage to get at least 1300 combined, that’ll help to offset GPA.</p>
<p>But again, it all depend on what school.</p>
<p>I’m looking specifically at the program at rutgers and I’ve been working for about 2 years. </p>
<p>also would it make much of a difference if I explained to them that my gpa suffered when I was in pharmacy school? </p>
<p>I switched to pysch my junior year. </p>
<p>thank you btw</p>
<p>So only rutgers then? I don’t know how competitive Rutgers is for LS&ER but it’s on the top for many others, so I guess it’s decently competitive.</p>
<p>This info came from chatting with adcom: If you have upward trend during your last 60 units it will help (e.g., first 2 years is 2.0 GPA, last 60 units is 4.0 GPA, lol this WILL help tremendously esp if classes related to LS&ER are on the 4.0 GPA and unrelated classes are on the 2.0) < if you have something like this then definitely explain this on SoP</p>
<p>But IMO GRE will need to improve (except AWA, no one cares about that if you get more than 4). The reason being, GRE can somewhat offset your GPA and also show that what you are saying is true, that you were just having hard time on pharm and when you switch to LS&ER classes you are awesome. Good GRE shows that. But I thought getting 550+ or even 650V+ should not be hard as native speaker? (I’m ESL and got 530 after studying 3 weeks, those GRE vocab was killer for me so I had to memorize 3000 words in 3 weeks, and I was having hard time to understand paragraphs quickly. Most my native speaker friends got 650 first try with only studying 2 weeks…lol…and they are in life science programs)
Getting 600+ Q should not be hard as well, just need practice and practice (it’s middle school math).
This was the old GRE though, I heard the new GRE so english is easier and math is harder. If you could retake and get at least 75% in both (550V 720Q score of old one, I dont know about new one) it would make your app more competitive.</p>
<p>650+ in verbal is in the 90 percentile, so clearly ‘everyone’ is not getting that!</p>