Tremble before my mighty godlike intellect, puny humans….

Atlastatlastatlastatlastatlast … After a week and a half of anxiety-producing study, cramming, and practice tests, I took the GRE General test this morning and received the above preliminary verbal and quantitative scores. (The final scores arrive in a few weeks.) My brain is still throbbing from the effort, but moreso from being gob-smacked by my scores, which were way way WAY higher than I expected. (For those who don’t know, nor care, the highest scores you can receive are 800.)

Here are my various thoughts on the GRE experience in random order:

• I really wish I’d started earlier and worked more steadily. I learned through this and a recent oral presentation in class that when i get anxious and nervous, I get mightily distracted from everyday life around me. I need to feel that I’m on top of the situation to feel OK about how things will go. In this case, though I’d started studying in May, by dedicating my Sundays to the cause, it was too much to load onto one day. I should have instead picked sections to work on throughout the week, and dedicated 2 or 3 sessions of math to every one verbal session.
• Thank goodness for friends who have taken the GRE and saved their prep materials. Mike had taken it earlier this year and felt so unprepared that he said he froze for 10 minutes when he saw the first math problem; he recommended I concentrate on studying the math. Rani and Richard passed along their GRE prep books and accompanying CDs, which came in handy when it was time to do practice tests simulating the GRE experience. I also checked out 2 books from the library and bought a small Barron’s Passkey book for the GRE. This was overload, no doubt, but having them close by made me feel better.
  
• What helped the most? Making my own flash cards. I used these a lot when riding the bus to school last month. I stopped using them in the last 2 weeks when I turned to the CD-based review tests, but I think now I would have benefited by continuing to test my memory. One of the things that makes the GRE less worrisome is knowing the square root of 3 and knowing on cue what 4/5 is as a decimal and a percentage without having to do the math.
  
• My god, I never realized how big the GRE aftermarket is, what with all the books, and online prep, and other materials. I even discovered too late that Durham Tech has a GRE math prep course, which I surely would have taken had I known about it.
  
• I didn’t worry too much about the essay questions: I had general templates in mind for each type of question and trusted I’d be able to spew usable material when needed, as this is what I do for a living, folks. I think I did pretty well here. My own strategy: using the last 5 minutes to read through the essay and make sure the intro and conclusion line up, and sprinkling keywords throughout that tie everything together.
  
• Since my summer class ended, I’ve spent most of my free time doing GRE math problems and taking the sample tests from the prep CDs. I’d take a GRE book to work and do 10 or 20 problems at lunch. Before I went to bed, I’d take a GRE book downstairs and work a page or two of problems. I was consistently getting about half wrong and half right. This is when it hit me that, you know, I’m only going to get to a certain level of good with this stuff, and that’s it. When will knowing the formula for finding the area of a cone ever get me out of a jam? I also finally crystallized why self-discipline is such a self-defeating strategy. Self-discipline requires imposing your will on yourself, and this constant fighting with yourself wears you out. It’s just too tiring. But when the goal means something to you, is important to you, self-discipline is not an issue at all. You just do what you have to do and suffer what you have to suffer until it’s done, so get on with it. Liz says cancer survivors are the same way; does it take self-discipline to go through chemo? No. You just know that you have to do it, no matter how painful it is. When you’re not fighting yourself, I think half the battle is won.
  
• Luck is not a bad thing either. There’s a great quote from Jimmy Dean that goes, “You should push your luck every day. Because you might be walking around lucky and not know it.” On the drive to the testing center, I was going a little too fast and saw a patrolman sitting in the median, pointed in our direction. I moved to tap the brake to turn off the cruise control and tapped the gas instead. (The car is still new to me.) I swerved a bit before I regained control and expected to see flashing lights in my rearview. But no. I continued on my merry way and the cop either didn’t see me or didn’t care. As I sped along, I thought of Jimmy Dean’s quote and smiled to myself. I was walking around lucky today. This occurred to me again during the verbal test; one of the reading comprehension pieces (a test I’ve not done well on in practice) was on jazz and I enjoyed reading it. What luck, to have a piece on jazz as part of the test. Answering the questions was easy.
  
• Liz wanted to see Tres Chicas the night before the test. I left work at noon, worked another practice test (on which I performed abysmally), and walked with her to the concert at American Tobacco. Although my thoughts strayed to the problems of combinations and ratios and percentage comparisons, it was good to get away from the computer, sit in the open air, and just chill. There’s more to life than the GRE and at a certain point, I realized I was not going to see major improvements in my math performance even if I worked problems for the next 12 hours straight. So I gave my mind a break and relaxed.
• On the day of the test, I ate lightly, did treadmill for about 20 minutes, and avoided coffee. I felt pretty good, and there’s enough adrenaline anyway that more stimulant isn’t needed.
• Liz and my co-workers will no doubt be relieved that I will now stop obsessing and talking about the GRE.
• Well…the scores I got flabbergasted me. I honestly didn’t think I did that well. The verbal is way, way better than I thought I’d get, and the math is at least 100 points or more over what I expected. I really don’t know how it happened, because the questions were at least as difficult as the ones I’ve been working this past week. On some, I was plainly guessing, going with gut instinct. The Kaplan prep CD keeps lots of statistics on the sample test scores, and one of them that impressed me was that I spent lots of time deliberating on some questions when the final result really didn’t matter–I usually spent lots of time on questions I got wrong. So when I felt the time running long, I’d go with my best guess and move on.
  
• Lessons learned: Is it possible to logically convince oneself not to worry too much? Or is that hard-wired? I noticed a big decrease in anxiety when I adopted the idea, “Let’s assume I’ll get into grad school no matter what I score. Let’s assume I win.” For whatever reason, that cut away a good bit of anxiety. Also: start early and adopt the strategy “little and often.” Chip away at this stuff and let understanding grow, if it wants to. Also: maybe I should believe in myself more. On my last two big challenges, I’ve exceeded what I thought I could do. So perhaps the GRE tested me in ways I hadn’t expected.