The third ti

I didn’t know what standardized tests were until high school, when I immigrated
from Colombia to the United States. I wanted to attend college so I took the
American College Testing exam. Fortunately, my high school offered a free prep
course and I managed to achieve good enough scores to get into college with
financial aid. During my first year, I told my biology professor I was passionate
about studying and protecting nature. He offered me a position in his lab, which
taught me how to conduct research and what a career in academia looks like. Then,
in my third year I was selected for a program that prepares undergraduate students
from underrepresented groups for doctoral studies. As I neared graduation, applying
to grad school felt like a natural next step.

But then I took the GRE and bombed, testing below average in all sections. I
couldn’t afford to enroll in a prep course, which cost upward of $3000. Instead, I
had studied using a $40 test prep book. As a native Spanish speaker, I found the
verbal section demoralizing. But what was even more daunting was the way the test
was administered: Correct answers were followed by harder questions. That affected
me psychologically: When easier questions appeared, I assumed I’d gotten the
previous question wrong.

Last week’s Working Life

Working Life is a personal essay series about career issues, challenges, and
successes.

Illustration of a man at a desk with a line running from his paper to family
members
As an early-career researcher, taking paternity leave felt risky
Read more Working Life
Convinced I would perform better and manage my test anxiety with more preparation,
I took time off after graduation to study full time. But my scores didn’t improve
on my second try. My hopes of becoming a scientist vanished.

Over the next few years, I took a series of temporary jobs. I worked in a molecular
biology lab troubleshooting protocols. Then I moved to Brazil—a place I’d always
wanted to live—and found jobs studying birds in the Amazon rainforest and curating
specimens in a natural history museum. That connected me with professors in Brazil,
where I was accepted into a master’s program.

After I defended my master’s thesis, a paper on which I was the lead author—my
first—was accepted for publication. Slowly, I began to see myself as a scientist. I
wanted to continue down the academic path. So after my partner and I moved to
Boston for his postdoc, I summoned the courage to give the GRE one last try. I
studied for weeks and paid $205 to book