It's 24 Hours Until the GRE: What Have I learned

Unless you're one of those people who works well under pressure, deciding the take the GRE in less than 2 months when, well, you haven't exactly been in school recently is not, ahem, a brilliant plan. And, if you're like me, you need a plan.

Oh, in case you're wondering why I decided to put myself through this, well, see, I got a letter from the human resource manager at West Point and decided, hell yes, I want to go teach History at USMA. Um, hello dream job. But I needed a plan.

My plan, in this case, sucked. I started studying in August in order to take the exam on Labor Day weekend. August was somewhat of a hellish month and so, at the last minute, I forfeited the 60$ and said to hell with it, I'm not taking this test. And so I rescheduled. Unfortunately, September was equally hellish and, well, I didn't do much by way of studying. Soo October rolled around and yes, I realized I was 3 weeks out.

And crap.

Math has never been my strong point and yet, in order to have a snowball's chance in hell of passing this stupid test, I needed to cram about 10 years worth of forgotten math into about three weeks.

Luckily for me, I discovered I actually had a whole extra week because while I thought I'd scheduled my test for the 22 of October, I'd actually scheduled it for the 29th. Cue extra week celebration.

Or not.

I actually took a practice test on Monday on paper in the book and, well, my results were abysmal to say the least. My dream job was slowly meandering down the street, further and further away and I was stuck on the sidewalk. So I got pissed.

I took a computer test that night. And didn't do nearly as bad as I thought I had. Practice test the following day, did better. So today, I'm taking one more practice test, just to warm up, and then I'm going to read a book and rest my brain.

I'm as good as I'm going to get. So, what did I learn through all of this?

First, unless your goal is to max this sucker and really learn all this crap, teach to the test. Now there are 800 books out there on the GRE. Don't do what I did and buy 17 of them. Pick the one that has the most ONLINE computer based practice tests. The Barron's book has 1. The Kaplan book has 1. The Princeton Review book with DVD has 4, but I didn' t know that at the time. So I ended up buying all four of those books.

Second, I have no idea WHY we can't just go online to any of these prep sites and buy practice tests but you can't. You have to buy the entire prep course which is to the tune of 400-500$. I had neither the time nor the money to invest in these things, so I was stuck with the books. Not a bad plan but still, the books above come with online practice tests. Use them.

The ETS practice software only comes with 1 practice test. So you get to take the same test over and over and over and they don't tell you it only comes with 1 test unless you call in. It's a pain in the ass but it's free so take it for what it's worth. Personally, I was a little annoyed but whatever.

Flashcards are your friend. If your vocabulary sucks, you need to pound new words into your scull because if you don't know the difference between peregrinate and perambulate (they're actually similar) you're not going to be able to discern the difference on test day.

Figure out what your weak areas are and focus on those. Unless you need a truly badass score, make sure you get the minimum for whatever program you're looking for. Otherwise, all the strengths in the world on verbal won't make up for the fact that you can't find the perimeter of a triangle raises hand sheepishly.

Anxiety matters. I could physically feel the difference when I would start getting frustrated with myself. Figuring out how to relax on test day is important. My method of choice will be a small glass of wine before I go in. Laugh if you want to or think I need AA but the bottom line is that if I let my anxiety get out of control, I won't be able to think straight and that will impact my score.

So we'll see how this whole thing pans out tomorrow. I'm hoping that I've done enough. What pisses me off the most is that I want to go back in time and slap my 7th grade self and tell her to get off her ass and study that math more. Because that whole conversation I had with multiple teachers about when will I ever use this stuff in real life?

Completely coming back to bite me in the ass.

Wish me luck!