Cannot Believe it! I had the last ever exam of my 4 year chemistry degree last Thursday, 13th May, 2010. The relief when it was over was unbelievable. With about twenty minutes to go, and a feeling that I had at least given the last exam a decent go of it, I left the RDS exam hall and headed outside to be greeted by half my class celebrating and doing shots of Sambuca, one of which was promptly forced down my throat. It was over! I could relax! I could sleep! I could celebrate!...and celebrate we did!
The next day I woke up to the sounds of our fire alarm and the smell of burnt toast with the faint feeling that someone had hit me over the head with something rather heavy. With the usual compulsion and habit that I had become accustomed to, I checked my email - just in case- and low and behold, there was an email entitled 'GAMSAT RESULTS ARE NOW AVAILABLE'. I wasn't sure whether I wanted to open them or not, convinced I had done fairly poorly. I knew I had a weekend of family invasion ahead of me, with a family reunion scheduled for Saturday, and with a rather intimidating family of apparetnly 70 odd members + partners, I really didn't want to enter into that feeling depressed and confused about life! I'd need my wits about me to dodge a thousand hugs and kisses and make small talk with the aunts and uncles...
I was sure I had got in the low 50's. I was so stressed with final year, and my research project, and putting in the lab hours and writing my thesis that I had literally given myself two days to prepare for the gamsat. I'll never forget the day before it, frantically reading some gamsat prep document online that recommended '2-3 months vigourous preparation and study', to which I could only afford a weak laugh. I gave it my best shot with what I could do at that stage. I took a healthy lunch, 2 litres of lucozade, a fully stocked pencil case and a stopwatch. Thank goodness for the stopwatch... I had calculated the day before that I needed to answer roughly 12 questions every fifteen minutes and I stuck to this rigidly which meant that I got all the questions answered, which apparently isn't easy to do.
I have never sat a more tiring exam in my life. By the time lunch time came, I was ready to go to bed... how we all sat another three hours of science questions feeling so wrecked is beyond me. There were some really nice chemistry questions so I attempted all of those first. Then I did any of the physics of biology questions I could. After that, I went through the others and made a stab at them all sometimes playing the eenie meenie mynie mo game.
I decided it was better to just open them and get it over with and here's what I saw...
I got a score of 62!! The breakdown was that I got 61 in the humanties questions (worth 25%), 69 in the essays (worth 25%) and 59 in the Science questions (worth 50%). I was SO HAPPY when I opened up the results, I couldn't believe it. If the cutoffs stay the same as last year (the highest being 60), this score will get me in to any of the four colleges so I am absolutely thrilled (and relieved and scared and overwhelmed and nervous and excited) ! The laugh of it all is that my worst score was in Science, having just finished a chemistry degree, and even funnier, my best score was in ESSAYS! This was the section I was convinced was going to be my downfall, not having written an essay since the leaving cert and having absolutely no interest in english. The concept of having to write two unknown essays in just one hour TERRIFIED me. I thought the quotes could have been a lot worse though. The first essay was based on the theme of censorship so I at least had an opinion on it and the second essay was themed on self esteem and its importance, so I gave that lots of waffle too, but to score 69 was an absolute shock ! This just really proves the power of bullshit.
PRAY for me that the cutoffs don't go up, and who knows, I might be a first year Grad Med student in september :) :)... now... where to choose...
No comments:
Post a Comment