From Wit’s End

Last year sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I was eating lunch in the cafeteria as I usually do. I was at the table with someone who was probably a temporary contractor of some sort, for I don’t remember seeing him before or since. He was an older black fellow, and wore a ball cap and glasses. We were making casual conversation, and somehow the subject of education came up. “You married?” He asked. I told him I wasn’t. “Well, you should take the time while you can then, to go back to school, before you have a family to take care of.” Now, my parents had brought up that option to me before, and it had occurred to me as well, but for some reason it was at the suggestion of that stranger that I finally started to think about it seriously.

So I clicked on a website link that mom sent me by e-mail that led to the Distance Learning program at Georgia Tech. On the preregistration form at the site, I saw that it was necessary to take the GRE, so I registered to take the test at the testing center of the University of South Carolina in downtown Columbia. The test was one of those new-fangled interactive computer tests, which made it a little different than I was used to. Though I checked a book out from the library on how to take the test, I didn’t make any time to study for it, and I walked into the testing center the night before we left for Arizona and took the test pretty much cold, just to see what would happen. Silly me…

…I should have studied for the Analytical portion, which was the one sort of test question that I wasn’t used to. The verbal and quantitative portions were much like the two parts of the SAT test that I took to get into college. But the analytical was a different animal all together, and I simply was not ready for it. “I’ll do better next month, especially if I study”, I told myself, and after about a week I signed up to do it all again in about a month.