Finally ITS over!!!

Whew! After months of thought, weeks of terror and days of preparation, it got over in a matter of a few hours! After a night of fitful sleep filled with nightmares, the day dawned brightly, and i got up with a sense of apprehension. So finally the day is here, the D-Day! Oh how much time have I spent anticipating this day, when it will finally get over? Anyway, half-heartedly got out of bed, with a small nagging feeling at the back of my mind- "Would it have been better if this day had never come, like the old adage, tomorrow never comes?" Then I realised there was no use worrying then, because what has happened has happened, and I had to face the day, no matter how I felt about it. With that resolve, I got ready and left to the battlefield.

I received a great shock on reaching the battlefield though. Everyone there was armed with some weapon or the other, while I was the only one coolly standing there without any weapon. Was I too very overconfident, I wondered. Following my parents' advice, I'd stopped gearing up for the battle yesterday itself. Anyway, finally after a few minutes of wait, we were all called into the GRE centre(Yes, GRE is the battle I'm talking about, the weapons were Barrons and other preparation materials, and the D-Day was the day of my GRE, ie, today :) )

So coming to the point, I entered the center and went through the checking in procedures with a bit of nervousness, and as I was led to the terminal, I felt butterflies flying in the stomach. Aah here I was finally, and it was about to begin. And so I sat, facing the computer, and lo and behold, all the nervousness vanished mysteriously! I started my GRE, and was so engrossed in it that I didn't have time to muse whether or not I was doing well. In what seemed like a fraction of a second, my test was over and I was out, but it was in fact 3 hours after I'd started. The test went on decently, and except for wasting too much time over a passage and rushing through 10 questions in less than 5 minutes, there was nothing much eventful.

There was something I realised during the exam though. I'd gone to the exam without practising for the essays, thinking I could spin yarns easily in those 1.25 hours. But it was after writing those essays and going through them that I realised that it had been ages since I wrote essays, and that even an 8th standard kid could write better essays. It was then that I vowed to practise writing more (using my blog as a medium), since anyway I'd need to improve my skills atleast before TOEFL. The major problem with me is, I'm too lazy and lose concentration and focus immediately :( Hopefully I'll keep up this resolution atleast :)

Now that description about GRE session is over, its time to rewind. Lets rewind by about a month, when, after sem exams, my GRE preps started (or were supposed to start). I came back home after exams, and decided it was time I started preparing for GRE. But at that time, 6 weeks seemed too long a time, and due to my inveterate laziness, I kept procastinating the task. Then slowly after a week or ten days, I started preparing, and did wordlists at the rate of one per 3 days. A few more days passed, and then I realised that I had barely a month left and I ought to speeden up my preparation. But then, the problem was, I couldn't find any way to speeden it up, because even if I tried to do it, my rate of remembering words reduced. I kept forgetting words, but realised there was nothing I could do about it.

I neither had the time nor the patience to learn the Latin and other roots of the words, but tried to link words to whatver roots I already knew. This helped a bit. Then, as I started learning more wordlists, I adopted this strategy which seemed to help me in remembering words better. Though its nothing different, I found it productive. First, I used to scan through the list, seeing how many I knew already, and trying to memorize new ones. Some words were really easy to remember, some could be easily remembered through association, and they required no further
working on. Then, I read the list again, marking words I didn't remember then. I went through those words alone a couple of times more, and then listened to an audio recording of the wordlist while at the same time following the words on the book. Then I checked the words, and voila, I remembered almost all the words. Though many words didn't stay after a day or two, atleast some of them did, and I guess the effort was worth it. But unfortunately, I couldn't follow this practice for all the lists, as I slacked in the middle and in the end, I had to do more than 4 lists a day in order to finish all the 50. Doing 4 was a bit tough, what with my project and all. I'd heard that flashcards were useful, but in the little time I had to prepare, I couldn't prepare them and all. But in the last week before the exam, I prepared a few cards for words I found very difficult and used them to learn. They were really effective, but I had time to prepare them only for a few lists, and wished I'd started before :(

Preparation for GRE is something I'd never forget, and I enjoyed some moments of them. There are some inerasable memories like reading barrons while in lab, and gettin advice from a pg guy in lab, who asked me to prepare for GATE, as it wasn't proper to prepare for GRE in the lab :) There have also been times when my friends, who were writing GRE much much later than me seemed to be better prepared than me, which made me feel nervous. Anyway now that it is all over finally, last but not the least, I'd like to thank all those friends who've helped me in this endeavour, either by quizzing me now and then, or blessed me with their wishes :)