My Halcyon Days

GRE October 25, 2008

I finally finished this notorious GRE exam today. Verbal 700 Quantitative 800. That should be a pretty decent score for engineering students, although I didn’t feel very comfortable with the analytical writing section and probably won’t score very well for that.  Anyway, that’s it, once in a life time and you just have to go through this.

There are certainly things I should learn from the process of GRE preparation and the actual test.  The verbal and writing parts are not easy.  But that shouldn’t have been the reason for it to look so much more scary than it is to me.  The fear for a GRE blunder had bothered me a lot, and to some extent it severely affected some my other plans. I should have followed Da’s advice to take it long before today. In fact,  I did just as what he predicted; Two weeks,  that’s exactly how long I seriously prepared for it,  no scary and detailed half-year or 3-month study plan.  I spent a weekend memorizing about half of the vocabulary I need from the “blue bible”.  Most of my preparation was done in the previous two weekends.

Take it easily.  Afterall,  who really believes that knowing something like “door:room = hatch:hold” got to do with your graduate school success in electrical engineering? The whole thing is just ridiculous, more ridiculous than having politics paper in graduate school entrance exams in China.