My Approach
GRE test prep
Much of my research, in both my undergraduate and graduate degree, has relied on qualitative textual analysis. If we adopt a high-level view, qualitative coding relies on many of the same skills required for acing a standardized test: the ability to hold a large number of discrete pieces of information in your head at once and looking at them from different angles until you see an overarching pattern emerge; and the patience to come back to the same corpus of data, over and over, till it begins to cohere.
These are the skills I applied years ago when I was studying for the GRE. I remember on my first practice test, I got only 75% of the answers right in the verbal reasoning part of the test. When it came time to take the test, I only got one question wrong, and I knew which one it was as I was walking out of the exam room.
Admission essays
Anyone completing a PhD, particularly in the humanities or the qualitative social sciences, will end up spending thousands of hours thinking about how to write clearly and persuasively, knowledge I can plumb to give you guidance on how to perfect that admissions essay. Throughout my graduate career, no writing advice has been more helpful than the one I received from the one and only Kathleen Hall Jamieson in her class on Rhetoric. From her, I learned how to consider my audience; how to put myself in their shoes and consider their priors to figure out the smartest way to make them progress toward your point of view; and how to convince them that what you want to do matters.