Let’s begin with the reason I haven’t been blogging: I have been SO busy that I haven’t even had time to procrastinate (and since procrastination is the major force behind everything I write...). Anyone who has seen me divide my frisbee team into our destined Hogwarts houses the night before a final exam (and thus knows my extraordinary powers of doing non-urgent things at extremely urgent times), knows that this means I am really, really busy. If I am too busy to blog, it means I am nearly too busy to gchat. And that would just be ridiculous, people.
So, the reason I have been so busy? An untimely combination of work deadlines and the dreaded GRE—a rather unpleasant blast from the past, for which I have forced myself to revisit those ugly brothers, The Princeton Review and Kaplan, for assistance in my quest to go to grad school. (Which grad school, exactly, is still up for debate—and I welcome your trenchant (GRE word!) comments on the subject, so please feel free to send some great advice my way. ANYWAY..).
I spent the past three weeks basically wavering back and forth between the decision to take and or not to take the darn exam, for which I thought I had started studying well in advance. It turned out that by Indian standards, I was WAYYY behind track, leading to a great deal of unnecessary anxiety and indecision. You see, two girls in my office had recently set their date for the GRE—and proceeded to take the following TWO MONTHS OFF FROM WORK in order to prepare. Another friend at work had been studying 4 hours a day for his GMAT. And one of my closest friends had been studying pretty diligently since we arrived in Delhi in September.
I felt very confused about how much studying was required to succeed.
In any case, I decided to go for the gold, and set myself to work, reviewing vocab, dissecting right triangles, and poring over practice tests in the weeks leading up to the exam, and somehow magically managed to score perfectly on the final practice test I took the night before my actual GRE-- an auspicious sign indeed! Needless to say, I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. I went to bed exactly on schedule, woke up exactly on schedule, and took off exactly on time for Gurgaon, a 1.5-2 hour journey from my house, to get to the centre well before my exam.
My auto-rickshaw pulled into the parking lot exactly an hour before my GRE was supposed to start, and a broad smile spread across my face. I couldn’t help reminiscing about my former self, who, at St. Paul’s, had to sprint full speed from the dining hall to the gym in order to get to the SAT on time. I was really growing up. An hour ahead?! This was unprecedented.
I walked down the stairs, found the centre, and asked to sign in. And this was when it hit me.
“Your photo identification, madame?”
I had forgotten my passport in Delhi.
2 long rickshaw rides and an hour-long metro ride away.
“Noooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!” My cries would have rung through the basement halls of the Prometric Testing Centre, but for the presence of 20-30 test-takers, who had competently remembered their photo identification when they embarked on this all-important venture. I was forced to bear my frustration, fury, and tendency toward emotional melt-downs in silence.
Luckily, the guy took pity on me… and happened to have an open slot at the evening testing time. So I ran back up to the road, took another 30 minute rickshaw back to the metro station, 1 more hour on the metro, 10 minutes rickshaw-ing to my house, ran up the stairs, got my passport, and did the reverse back to the testing centre in Gurgaon. If you can imagine going from the Bronx to Long Island, then realizing you didn’t have your passport, going back to the Bronx and then back to Long Island again, and then taking an expensive and fairly important 4 hour standardized test, well, that’s pretty much how it was.
I finally got back to the test centre 3 hours later, sat down, and took my GRE…. And beat my goal score by 60 points! Hooray! I’m not sure if the scores they show on the screen are completely accurate (since they’re technically inofficial), but in any case, I’m very relieved and excited to be done with standardized testing for A WHILE. Maybe forever. Wooooo!
The End. Until Part 2.
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