It isn’t often you meet someone who finished the GRE with a perfect score. While most test-takers are pleased to achieve a score of 160 on the Graduate Record Examination, earning a 340 only happens to 1% of the people who take the test that measures verbal and quantitative reasoning. 

John Na is now in that 99th percentile. A former Sandy resident, Na is an MPA student at Harvard University. He took the GRE five years ago, with a near-perfect score but nailed the 340 after the 2024-25 fall semester. 

“I studied a lot during winter break, and I basically spent a few weeks cramming for this,” Na said. “I got the official guide to the GRE, the whole book is 604 pages long…I went through every single page, every single practice question. Every question that I got wrong, I scrutinized the solution until I knew how to get it quickly. I think I did five practice tests in total.”

Na knew he had to keep his stress level low during the test, so not only did he study but he focused on healthy eating, exercising and getting a solid night’s sleep. The morning of the test, he put on comfy clothes, ate a moderate breakfast, made sure to use the bathroom and went into the test having a mindset tuned toward success.

This isn’t the first time Na has aced an academic test. When he attended Elder High School in Cincinnati, he earned a perfect score for his SAT. He went on to earn his undergraduate degree at Maine’s Bowdoin College in 2015.

Na first moved to Utah in 2021, after he got his MBA at the University of Notre Dame. He worked with Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley until he started the Masters of Public Administration Program at Harvard Kennedy School and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“I’m living on campus in a grad student dorm and I think I’ve adjusted to the workload and the classes. I ended up taking two law school courses this fall, along with my MPA courses,” Na said. “One of the courses I took this fall was about inequality and then there’s another one that was called Strategies for Social Impact. It was like an entrepreneurship course with case studies. So I really enjoyed both of those.”

He hopes his perfect GRE score will allow him to get into a good law school to help him prepare for his legal career. The GRE measures readiness for graduate-level work and potential for success. 

Along with building a foundation of knowledge and developing a test-taking strategy that includes time management and mindfulness, Na had advice for students preparing to take any academic test. 

“Stay healthy and have a positive mindset,” he said. “I like to work out a lot in my free time, I lift weights and I swim. I tested the assumption, does lifting weights make your IQ go down? I’ve been hitting the weights a lot and my score went up, it didn’t go down. So I think I got my answer.”

Na hopes to go into employment law or anything focused on Asian American civil rights. His father is from South Korea and his mother is from Cincinnati. He said it’s interesting to be half-Korean and see how people interact with his ethnicity. 

“I’m definitely interested in better understanding factors that lead to ending inequality and how societies can overcome that,” he said. “I’m interested in ways that Asian Americans, as a group, can improve their situation in the U.S.” λ