I (Jacoby) have been applying for a Department of Defense scholarship called the SMART scholarship that would pay me half my salary to go back to school for a graduate degree for the next year. My work will be gracious enough to let me work part time so in essence, I would be making my full salary and getting a graduate degree at the same time. However, in order for me to actually receive the scholarship I need to be accepted to graduate school. And in order for me to get accepted to graduate school at the school I would like to attend (UCSD - its close so I could still work part-time and it has a really good robotics branch of their EE department) I need good GRE scores. Last year I prepared a few months for the test and when I took it, I was very dissappointed with my scores. That verbal test is incredibly tough. When you are supposed to pick an antonym of a word, and you don't recognize that one nor 4 of the 5 answer choices, it can be a very difficult test. Here is an example of an antonym question I have seen (not from the actual GRE tests I have taken because that would be a breach of my testing contract):
OPPROBRIOUS:
(A) meretricious
(B) innocuous
(C) invulnerable
(D) irreproachable
(E) ambitious
Do you see what I mean? Opprobrious? Meretricious? When I don't even know what I am supposed to take the antonym of, this gets tough. The answer is D. Opprobrious means "expressing offensive reproach" and irreproachable means "not subject to blame, faultless".
Anyway, so I bombed the test last year and things didn't fall into place to go back to school and get the scholarship. So I am applying for the scholarship again this year and I knew I would take the GRE once again. But this year I have been studying on and off for the last year, mainly studying vocabulary. Its the weirdest thing but I see all these new words in novels and publications all over the place. Its like everyone else is learning and using these new words with me. So I took the test yesterday again with my new-found vocab knowledge and I rocked it! I raised my verbal score by more than 200 points (which either means I got a near perfect score this time or I must have done really poorly last time - ding ding ding ding we have a winner) and my math score even went up too. Still, I haven't even applied to UCSD or for the scholarship and I don't know if I will be accepted, but I have a much better chance than I did last year, and I know I won't have to take the test again.
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2 comments:
Congrats!! I dread the thought of any type of testing. The happiest day of my life besides my wedding day and the birth of our kids was walking out of the testing center for the last time. Relief! Keep us posted!
Wow, that was a hard word! I'm glad you did better this time. How did you go about studying vocabulary? I mean, do they have specific study publications for the GRE vocabulary section? Good luck with the scholarship! Whatever happens, you guys had better not move out of San Diego!
P.S. Last night was great! Soren loved all the lights and "cards," and I think he especially loved hanging out with Coby. Thanks for the great idea!
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