jeffchin.com

The month of buckling down has come to an end, and I feel free again. The GRE went well, I reached my target score and exceeded my expectations on the quantitative section. My verbal skills must have reached a plateau in high school since I scored about the same as I did almost a decade ago on the SAT’s.

To celebrate, I had a bunch of my friends meet up at The Continental in Rosslyn to watch the basketball games, and take advantage of some cheap happy hour deals which included multiple chili dogs, and even some cans of PBR & Miller High Life. Sorry no pictures this time around. Unfortunately my bracket winner Georgetown, whose campus was a mere half mile away, stumbled in the Final Four against Ohio State. The Florida game was a snoozer (check out the “game flow” chart – middle right.)

So, if I get into school – no more worrying until summertime…

TV to me is dying a slow death. I used to come home from work and knock out 2-4 hours of programs off my TiVo and DVR every night, but with the combination of adding studying to my daily routine and bland story lines – my season’s passes are dropping like flies.

Another factor that has come into play is the addition of 2 magazine subscriptions. I now subscribe to Wired and Business Week. Who knew there’d be so much pressure that comes along with getting a new magazine every week? What are you watching, and is there anything that I absolutely should add to my “keepers” list?

Dropped:
The OC (couldn’t even finish out the final season)
Lost
Heroes
Most MTV reality shows

Keepers:
Prison Break
Grey’s Anatomy
How I Met Your Mother
The Office

Hanging on by a Thread:
24 (Jack, please don’t kill me)
Scrubs

This past Thursday marks the beginning of my month of “buckling down”. I enrolled myself in a Kaplan GRE prep course that meets two times a week for a month. I’ve tried to study on my own before using GRE books, but I always lose interest and stop about a week later. I figure throwing some money behind at prep class would keep my attention. And just so I can’t squirm out of taking the GRE for another 6 months, I already signed up to take the test shortly after the prep class ends.

There is homework to be done between classes but I have also been exercising my brain in other small ways that don’t really have anything to do with knowing the antonyms of words no one ever uses, or determining from a passage, what the author’s real thoughts on the migration patterns of different animals are. I noticed that when I’m reading one of the bland and pointless passages for a practice test, I tend to lost interest, drift off and skip around randomly. I’ve been trying to increase my attention span by reading articles online and in magazines…all the way to the end. Usually I just stop after I get the gist of the article, or kind of scan through just to make sure there aren’t any more major points.

The other thing that I’ve done to try to increase my attention span is when listening to my iPod on the way home from work, I try not to skip through songs. You’d think this would be easy, but I find myself skipping tracks pretty often, about 30 seconds to a minute into each song.

Tonight I’m headed to good ol’ Iota to catch Juniper Lane. They will most certainly hold my attention. Check out pictures in my Flickr photostream if I remember to bring my camera.