A not so GREat day

2: 00, Friday, I find myself reveling over getting two tests with 100% on each of them on the same day. That's never happened before. Maybe. I head home, trying to figure out how the hell I'm gonna memorize all the words in my newly acquired GRE verbal companion book in the next 24 hours before my big test. I estimate there are some 2, maybe 3000 words in the glossary. Gulp. This isn't gonna be hard. I read through some of the typical instructions, run through a couple practice sections, and do modestly well on those.

4:00, Friday, I'm watching the final match of the Jeopardy teen tournament, trying to decide my plan of action. A girl nicknamed Steve comes in second. A sophomore named Rachel comes in first. I find a section labeled 200 must know GRE words. I will have these things memorized by morning, I tell myself. This will be a cake of cake.

7:00, Friday, I got distracted a lot, and only made it to the E's. I head off to go to my friend Kelsey's 21st birthday party. Seeing that I had given up liquor for lent, I was bound to be one of few sober people. I get there, and only know people by connection. It's mostly her sorority sisters, and her boyfriend's friends. I drink some Mountain Dew and play a little Halo (badly), and give Kelsey her present- 21 bucks in lottery tickets. Had they gone to a bar closeby, I might've gone with them, but going to the Eastside would have taken up too much of my time. And I even put on cologne! I never do that.

11:30, Friday, in a state half filled with anxiety for testing and my stupidity for getting all gussied up and then not going anywhere, I arrive home and fastly fall asleep.

8:00, Saturday, I crack open the book and keep reading through breakfast. I read the words out loud to my mom and my aunt, and they make up funny stories with them as they try to guess what they mean. We finished the list around 10:30 or so, enough time for me to get ready to leave.

1:00, Saturday, I'm at the Student Union eating Panda with my friend Noah who lives at the dorms. We discuss the implications of what the GRE does and whether or not he should take it, as well. He's a good guy, but is technically three semesters behind so he's technically a first semester sophomore. But that's semantics. He says he'll probably transfer once all of his friends, the class of '09, graduate.

2:00, Saturday, it begins. Obviously I'm not inclined to talk about the questions I got. Let's just say that the vocab book helped me little if any. Most of the words I had never seen before, let alone knew how to pronounce. I find myself paying close attention to the clock, and revel in the fact that I remembered a word from 11th grade English class. The math was pretty easy, but oddly calculation heavy at times. The essays I think I did well on, but we'll have to see on those.

5:00, Saturday, it ends. I finish and get immediate scores. Drumroll please:

Quantitative: 800 (Yay!)
Verbal: 510 (Ugh...)
Writings: TBA (outlook: yay?)

6:00, Saturday, so I was looking at the statistics they included with the practice disk and saw that my score was about average, 50th percentile or so, for people who regularly get a graduate degree in Engineering or Math. (Odd fact: Physics people tend to score higher on the verbal and quantitative sections among all science majors, even math grad students!) So from a statistical standpoint, I'm okay scorewise, just okay, but would be much happier with a higher score. So I might retest, I don't know. I'd shoot for a 600 in verbal, but even that might be farfetched. Gah. I was hoping I wouldn't have to worry about this. Oh well.