An Update from Will

During Sara's school year she would spend nearly every waking moment at home inside our little office. I got a taste of what that is like during the month of July as I studied for the GRE. I have a great view of our little red BBQ, I can open the window and sometimes hear the horn of The Spirit of Portland as it makes its way down the mighty Willamette River but best of all I can bring in our oscillating tower fan and pretend that I'm on a far-off beach, enjoying a gentle breeze.

I took my first GRE practice test Monday, July 9th and got a 152 on both the Verbal and the Quantitative portions. Now, this threw me off a little bit because I was expecting the scoring to be on a scale of 200-800 like the old GRE and boy, did I have work to do. I thought that I had somehow scored below the lowest possible score.  I quickly learned that when they revised it last year they changed the scaling system to 130-170.

Since Sara was in Roseberg every weekday all that I could do was study. And study. And study.... It's amazing how fast a month goes by. Before I knew it August 11th had snuck up on me and it was time to take my test.

I went in, turned all my pockets inside out, had a metal detector wand make sure that I wasn't bringing in illegal thumb tacks that I might use to coerce another test taker into telling me if Column A or Column B was bigger, if they were the exact same or if I could not tell with the given information. Since those were confiscated I had to rely on the fact that I had been studying for the past month to get me a score that I might be proud of.

It's kind of an odd thing, looking at a button the screen that says "continue" knowing that after I press it I will find out if the past month's studying was worth it. I pressed it, and found out that it was.

Verbal: 162
Quantitative: 164

I haven't gotten the official scores yet (those should come in the next week or so) so I don't know percentiles or the grades of my essays but I'm feeling pretty good.

Now it's onto grad school applications! (Right after I get over this cold that Sara brought home from her first week in pediatrics)