Saturday, October 11, 2008

Anxiety.....HELP

Intellectually I am no Albert Einstein, but I am no Jessica Simpson either. Most people actually call me a nerd, for one i'd rather be in school agonizing over a 20 page research paper rather than crunching numbers in a cubicle. If I could go to school forever I would, and I am actually planning on it, wanting to go into academia and research.

Right now I hold a rather useless undergraduate degree. And, pretty much all undergraduate degrees are pretty much useless. I could not tell you nor care to tell you about floating exchange rates and imperfect capital mobility. But, I can draw really cute color coordinated supply and demand curves. And, I can also tell you that Karl Marx may have been a tad bit right about the perils of capitalism, seeing the current state of our economy.

Anywho...

And, to my shock my employer cared less the 8 semesters of knowledge crammed in my head. All they cared about was my ability to be a team player, effective communicator, able to analyze a situation, sound judgement, and sanity. All things I learned in Kindergarten.

So what does one do with a very useless undergraduate degree?

Well obviously you get a useful one, at a place called graduate school. But before, I embark on another academic triatholon, I have to take a little test called the GRE to measure my quantitative and verbal ability. Ya right! Let me tell you how much sleep I have lost agonizing over this exam. And that is my problem!

I am one of those kids, that gets short of breath before a test, my palms sweat, and i start thinking about every horrible thing that could happen to me if I failed the test. Something to the affect of turning into a failure and disappointment to society like having to sell crack to keep a a roof under my head. Yeah scary stuff like that! But, I have never failed a test, ok, maybe I have like once but once does not count. Actually, I am not one to get grades below B's, and mind you that letter is a disappointment for me, but before every test I have to go through the same routine of test anxiety.

Most people think that I pretend to do that, but for me it is realer than real. And this three letter word G-R-E is about to send me to the mental ward. No matter how many times I tell myself I think I can I think I can, it just does not work. Thomas the Train, sorry but repeating that phrase over and over again just doesn't cut it for me.

I had an awful dream last night, of being at the test center and having a dysfunctional computer which meant I could not take the exam. But the twist was, the testing center blamed the computer malfunction on me and they banned me from ever taking the GRE again, which meant I could not get into grad school! See! It is bad I tell ya.....HELP

1 comment:

PastelGuy said...

Actually, from someone who's taken the GRE, LSAT, Miller's Analogy, and just about every other one out there, it's not bad. Back in the day when I took it (no computers then, just good ol' graphite!), it was actually kind of fun - all these logic problems and such. So just sleep well, eat well, get l&@%, and you'll do fine. I have to take our state's Principal Test in a couple of weeks to see if I qualify to be a public school administrator. I think I'll skip the studying, thanks.