extended adolescence = medical school

Well, it is finally over. Yesterday I took the test at a junior college out in the boonies, as it was the last testing center location available that was within 100 miles of my home. I had about a week’s worth of personal “preparation,” which consisted of me finishing book 1 of the Dark Elf Trilogy and reluctantly completing a computer-based practice test, plus a fantastic two-day Veritas GMAT math course. I took that course a month ago, but it was so awesome that most of it stuck. I really wasn’t worried much about verbal until I got to the testing center; upon arriving, I started to obsessively ruffle through my Princeton Review book for a last-minute sentence correction review. After that, at 11 AM, I went inside the confines of a certain junior college (I will refrain from insulting the campus) and found myself at a computer wearing a set of extremely powerful earplugs (mine) beneath a set of adjustable orange earmuffs (theirs). My only complaint during the test was that my left wrist and hand started to feel cold and numb during the second writing sample. Otherwise, the test was pretty manageable.

Heh…ok…it was actually pretty hard. I prayed for about five minutes beforehand, asking God to give me focus, efficacy, and confidence. It was still hard, but I felt good the entire time I was taking the test. Still, the math portion was quite taxing, and I ended up running out of time and randomly guessing on the last six questions. Having never taken a computer adaptive test before, I’d read up on the format in my Princeton Review book. Apparently the last few questions don’t matter, anyway, as long as you answer something. Your score is pretty much decided within the first ten or so questions.

The verbal section was fun, though. I was especially pleased when I started getting extremely tricky sentence correction problems–that meant I was doing well! Thank you, Mom, for teaching me English! Honestly, I loved it! I could do that all day as a job and I wouldn’t mind it a bit. Maybe I should have been an editor.

When I got my score report I nearly passed out, I was so happy.  Actually I was pretty shocked. I got 97th percentile in verbal and 77th percentile in math, which added up to a 95th percentile GMAT score of 720 (trust me, the math score is WAY better than I would have gotten had I not prepared–stop laughing, math geniuses!)

I was just shooting for above a 640. Hopefully my score is good enough to get me a merit-based scholarship from my MBA school. That’s all I need and then I’m set for the next year-and-a-half.

After the test, I munched on CVS’s delicious imported gummy bears while driving out of Junior College Town and then through five o’ clock traffic. It took me a full hour to go from downtown to the med center…not sure how far that is but I’d guess it’s less than five miles. Good ‘ol big cities.