The GRE, Crabs, and More Soldering Woes

A post of random personal updates.

1) The Freakin' GRE
Yes, I'm finally done with this frustrating and burdensome test. For those who don't know, the Graduation Record Examinations is a standardized exam that students have to take if they want to go to grad school in the United States (and some schools from other countries). In North America, the GRE is usually administered via computer in test centers and the general test consists of a verbal section, a quantitative section, and a writing section. I don't really mind the writing and quantitative sections since they aren't too difficult, but the verbal section is a chore because it require me to learn a big pile of vocab that is rarely if ever used. It's basically a very annoying vocab test. As unappealing as the exam is, it is a requirement for many graduate programs in US universities, so I had to study for it.

I took the exam yesterday and thankfully I did pretty well. I got 800 (full marks) in the quantitative section and 720 (pretty good) in the verbal section. The quantitative mark was expected since that section was easy and also engineering students need to be good at math, but my verbal score was a pleasant surprise. I did two practice tests before the real exam and got 660 both times, so I got lucky with the questions or I am just clutch lol. Looks like my three months of vocab cramming paid off, but judging my steady stream of posts here you can probably tell that I didn't study very hard. Anyways, as long as I get 4 or 5 (out of 6) on my two essays in the writing section then my scores shouldn't have any trouble meeting the requirements to the schools I want to go to.

**Update: I got 4.5 on the essay writing. Not great, but still better than the 50th percentile.

With the GRE out of the way, I can move on the next step of getting into grad school, which is to write a statement of intent and references. As irritating as the GRE is, it's probably one of the easier requirements of the grad school application process. Finding good references is probably much harder. It's just the way it is, and I'll keep jumping through the hoops until I get an acceptance letter.

------------------

2) Crabs!
In celebration of my triumph over the GRE, my family ate a lot of crabs. Seven of them to be exact:

Well actually we ate the crabs on the night before my GRE, but there's still plenty of crab meat left over since we couldn't eat so many crabs in one sitting. If you are wondering how big the crabs in the photos are, I'd say the brown-green ones are 17cm to 20 cm across the carapace, and the red ones are smaller. Maybe eating crabs the night before boosted my scores lol. Anyways, the crabs were caught off the local waters by my relatives. Seven legal sized crabs is a pretty impressive catch, but it's not really a surprise given my relatives are expert crabbers and I am the de facto internet authority on crabbing. (do a Google search for "crabbing" if you don't believe me)

------------------

3) More Soldering Woes
If you read this post, you'd know I don't find soldering tiny pieces of electronics to be particularly easy or enjoyable, but in the spirit of learning and getting the job done I am still chugging away with the soldering iron. Since my aforementioned post, I killed three more test boards at work with my soldering. The first one is because I ripped a copper pad when I removed a component from the board (if you need apply force to remove a soldered down component then you are doing it wrong). The second one was another short between closely-spaced pins. I had the company soldering expert trying to clear the short. He removed the entire chip, cleaned it, and soldered it back on and discovered that it was still shorted, so he gave up and worked a new board instead. The last kill was on purpose since I was helping to investigate why boards are dying under certain conditions. I replicated the condition and lo and behold the board died and was unrecoverable. In total, I have killed five test boards, and I'm sure this count will keep increasing until my work term is finished.

So has my soldering skills improved since my last soldering post? Yes, but not by very much. The wires I solder on still break off easily, and I still haven't learned the right way to solder wires onto tiny, closely-spaced pins without shorting them every so often. I did however successfully flip a resistor that's the size of a grain of sand on its side and then solder it down onto the board without killing anything. That's probably the most impressive soldering feat I have ever accomplished lol.

------------------

That's all for this off-topic post. Time to go back to deciding whether I should blog CANAAN or Bakemonogatari.