Joy to the World, The Lord has come! And my GREs are dooonnnne! Sing it with me!
Okay I can begin to regroup a bit, I wanted to say thank you for your prayers and support. I don’t know what proper etiquette is about scores but people keep asking me how I did, so here it goes. I took the test at the Cathedral of Learning on Pitt’s campus on what I realized was Friday the thirteenth of 2013 at approximately thirteen o’clock, this may explain why this time slot was the only one available for many, many weeks. Praise God, I am not superstitious and so was simply thankful that the space was prepared for me. I signed up with only 7 days to prepare and while I was feeling okay about the verbal part (no surprise there, yackety yackety yackety yack 🙂 I was deeply concerned about the quantitative portion, also know as duhduhdunnnnh math. Math is my kryptonite, the evil nemesis of my entire educational career. I cried more tears over that subject than anything else combined in school (other than being outrageously unpopular with a questionable sense of style.) So I spent the past week, literally every waking moment that I was not at work, reviewing the 100 plus page booklet they give you to prepare for the math section. It was literally almost all new to me (my apologies to all my former math teachers and my Dad, it just didn’t stick guys). I spent a considerable amount of time on the phone to my father in law, Al, who was a math teacher before he retired. Al was an incredible encouragement as I tried to cram three to four years of high school math into seven days. The test takes anywhere from three and half to four and half hours and it is computerized, so you sit in a little cubicle at a computer either clicking on answers or typing them in. There are two essays to write and then two verbal and two quantitative sections of twenty questions each. It’s grueling. I finished in three and half hours since I skipped the breaks and just pushed through. The scoring is based in some unfathomable way on a scale of 130 to170 except on the essays which are scored 1 to 6. They give you an unofficial quantitative and verbal score as soon as you finish and then you have to wait about ten days for the essay score to come in along with your official scores. So drumroll, my unofficial score on the quantitative section, which I’d like to point out represents a 16 point improvement from my first sample test score of 130 or a zero, was 146 which translates into about a 25%. So, not so good compared to others but it does demonstrate that I can learn this stuff, I just need time. On the verbal I got a 170, which is really good and I am hoping to do equally well on my essays. So that’s the low down on the GREs. I’ll write more later about what I am hoping to accomplish by heading back to school. My program application deadline is January 15th so I’ll be pretty focused until then. Thanks again, Nicole
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