#10 Pass GRE with 80%

The Study Plan

Everyone who knows me a little bit knows I'm a geek who loves school and loves studying. So after two years in Canada, I though it was about time to get a degree here. I have my Master's in Psychology from Belgium, but to work as a psychologist here you need a PhD. Kerry and I had talked about it lots, he was most exciting about having a girlfriend who would be a doctor, I was most excited about going back to school. Now in Belgium, going to university is easy peasy. You choose what you want to do, you enroll and off you go. In Canada, not so much. One of the admission requirements to the Master in Psychology here is to pass the GRE, the Graduate Record Examinations. It's like the SAT but for graduate programs. And it's hard, especially for non-English speaking people like me! The computer test takes 4 1/2 hours with one 10-minute break and looks a bit like this:

• 1 essay in 30 minutes on topics such as education, political leadership, the importance of history, the role of technology...
• 1 essay in 30 minutes, analyzing a faulty argument, highlighting the reasoning flaws and suggesting improvements
• 2 verbal sections, each 20 questions in 30 minutes, focusing on (for me) extremely difficult words like obsequious, pellucidity, animadversion, masticate and more (really, do you people use those words??)
• 2 math sections, each 20 questions in 35 minutes, lots of algebra, geometry and a little data analysis… Stupid questions like 'What is the area of a triangle with coordinates (0,2), (2,4) and (1,6)'?
• 1 experimental section (either math or verbal) that does not count for grades, only to torment you more

Anyway, after months of studying I passed it with an 84 overall!!