Lifestyle Changes and the GRE

It's about my GRE experience again.


I booked my GRE about 4-5 weeks prior to the day of the exam. Usually, people take 1-2 months of rigorous training, often assisted by coaching institutes, before deciding they're good to go ahead. My decision to directly book the date came from the experience of seniors who said that the seriousness of the situation isn't grasped till a deadline is set. Knowing myself, I was sure I had to book it to gather enough motivation to start studying.

At this point in life, my college year was over and I was home, working in a company for the mandatory in-plant training (IPT). The IPT is ~17 km away and my working hours made it so that I left home at about 8 am and reached at around 7 pm. This small window from 7 pm to 12 am -- after a full day of work -- was all I had for coffee, dinner and studies. I was aspiring for two things: being good at work and doing good in an independent examination. It gave me a taste of how it might feel to work part-time while studying or the hardships people face when they seriously don't have enough time to enjoy life. It was a humbling experience.

I started with really terrible scores in the verbal reasoning section. It was when I read the theory and strategy parts of more than a few reference books that I realized I'd been doing it all wrong! The GRE is not an exam where literary style and flair or gut feeling -- which I was relying heavily on -- rule. I realized I was escaping the gruelling passages and vocabulary by thinking, "Meh, it sounds about right."

When I did buckle down for the final week of study, I applied the methods I read about (they work very well) and did, what I believe to be justice, to all the mock tests. My scores jumped, and I kid you not, nearly 10 points in a matter of a couple of days. I performed even better than I expected in the actual exam. It told me that it is usually worth being rigorous with what you do and that half-hearted attempts don't work outside the Uni.

I also experienced something rather unpleasant -- the mundane routine of everyday life. In college, you learn something new every day and that excites me. Here, the same route to work, the same workplace, the same content, the same thoughts, the same way home, the same coffee, the same studying -- it is mentally frustrating. I tricked myself into looking forward to whatever I was going to do. I tried to thinking innovatively about the problems at work while commuting. I planned out how I and what I should study on the way home. And life became easier.

Experience is not the best teacher. It is the best guide.

How I'll be Posting

I was thinking about the structure (in my mind) of how I'll be arranging my thoughts in posts and ultimately publishing them here.

Daily life, especially when you're working, is different -- at least in my field(s) of interest -- from a vacation or holiday. There's not enough freedom to revel in thoughts for undue periods of time, or to travel for leisure. The mind is not free and unburdened.

In reality, experiencing interesting stuff is not in your hands. You must wait for things to happen to you. You can't go grabbing a chance before the chance has a chance to present itself. The most you can do is put yourself out there -- juicy bait in a small shallow corner of a vast lake. It's no surprise, then, that, as in fishing, you often need to be patient.

Interesting ideas, too, follow this rule. They do just pop into your head, usually going off on a tangent, having only a semblance of relevance. Exposing yourself to unusual situations might help trigger them, but how often is that possible?

I've started systematically collecting these precious rarities to serve as the ingredients for this blog. My plan, as of now, is to write once a few days -- maybe twice or thrice weekly -- once enough ideas for a post have accumulated.

Also, I'm thinking of including a bit of technical stuff -- not much more than what was in the previous post.

Musings from My Commute - I

Exactly as it sounds, it is my unforced thoughts as I ride my way home on my scooter along with the ponderous traffic.

I had to slow down while going around another rickshaw trying to enter the road with little consideration for the road. You thought that slowed me down -- No! I'm just as efficient at managing speed and time as other drivers -- better, if you ask me. I had to slow down for a man obliquely strolling across the road, as if trying to cross it.

That was enough to spark my mind off on a tangent. What if the man was actually trying to cross the road obliquely? Would he argue that light also travels obliquely in a similar manner when it passes through optically denser media? My counter-argument was ready:
"Are you like light? Will you switch off like a bulb at the press of a button? Or will you extinguish like a candle if it gets too windy?
"Of course not! I burn brightly forever like the sun."
"So, you disappear at night? That's odd."

I found this funny.

The other thing was technical. It's monsoon season here and the roads are wet. I was wondering which would be more helpful -- hydrophilic or hydrophobic coatings on vehicle tyres. Would hydrophilic coating cling to the water on the road and reduce slipping, or would the tyres acquire a layer of water worsening the situation? I agreed the latter is more likely. Would hydrophobic tyres skid on surfaces covered with water (like water does on hydrophobic surfaces), or would the water be pushed away for the tyre to contact the ground? Again, I agreed with the latter.

Note: I said I'd post weekly/biweekly the last time. However, now I feel I'd be more comfortable whenever I get ideas. Seeing that I spend almost two hours commuting every work day, that would be frequent. The poems and short pieces of prose I've written will come gradually -- There's no hurry. (You can look for them on Medium (Search for my name (Thought I forgot parentheses? No way!)))

Updating regularly from now on - I promise!

Hello, readers! In a nutshell - I've been busy doing stuff such as not updating this blog. Now, for the post:
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EXAMS, again...

Ah, exams – an inevitable and recurring part of life – are welcomed with fear and excitement by nervous students. After stressing about studying hard, for me at least, I lose nearly all my motivation to study a few days prior to the day of judgement. I do not know why this happens – I’ve never thought about it. Before my NTSE, I decided to try playing all possible game modes and configurations in Age of Empires II. During my SSC boards, I developed an intense interest in learning Urdu online, which I did to a level that serves my purpose. My HSC boards saw me taking notes of undergraduate chemistry courses in organic synthesis. During my first year at college, I started watching ERASED – a murder mystery. Today as I write this, a couple of days before my GRE, having ascertained this trend, I have taken a break from studying to write about my thoughts on this. Also, I’m tired from all the cycling I did this afternoon out in the first rains of the season.

Standard examinations such as the GRE at the international level, the JEE at the national level and the boards exams at the state or regional level have one thing in common – a relatively fixed pattern of questions and the source of these questions. College exams are different in the sense that – again, for me – paying attention in class and a quick revision usually suffices. That is, unless you cannot match the professor’s wavelength and have no idea what’s been taught, in which case an all-nighter does the trick. Nevertheless, the repetitiveness of the protocols to be followed in exams and the persistent pressure to test your mettle in mock tests gets boring. And you need a break.

One theory is that, assuming the preparation strategies have worked out and there’s no need to burn any metaphorical oil, your studies are pretty much done around a week before the exams. Revising, then, adds nothing to your pool of information and knowledge, and trying to re-read stuff just makes me sleepy. As sleeping feels like wasting time, opting for active rest – indulging in some other activity – sounds like a better option. All the minor points on the invisible bucket list of the mind rush into picture. In this way, I have accomplished many things: understanding Western classical music; reading musical notation; speaking a rudimentary level of French, Korean, Spanish, Russian, and a more than rudimentary level of Japanese; a certification in linguistics; knowledge about pure chemistry stuff that I won’t go into right now and so on… It just has to be something that is involved enough to take my mind off the exams and keep me interested.

Based on this, I draw two conclusions. First, you need some idea of what you want to do other than what you’re supposed to do (i.e. your job). Second, I like to brag about what I’ve done. Continuing the trend, the only course of action ahead of me is to plan my studies in such a way that I am seen squandering my precious pre-exam time on unrelated matter and then (hopefully) topping the exams ‘effortlessly’.

(Also, this random write-up is a part of my GRE preparation. Though this doesn’t adhere to the pattern of the exam in any direct way, it helps me practice coherence in writing grammatically correct sentences and logically structured prose.)

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Planning to update weekly/bi-weekly. Let's see how it goes. I have some small pieces - including some dark poetry - ready, and have realized that writing is an effective stress release. I like writing but can't be absolutely certain whether life will keep on stressing me enough (and in the proper way) to write. I'll try, of course, on my side to keep things running.