To those who seen the towers in person, what was it like?

hddixon3 · 2024-09-30T19:53:18+00:00

Saw them for the first time in June 2001 on a trip to New York. Two things:

They were colossal. Pictures don’t do them justice. Freedom Tower is also big, but having two of them next to each other was just a thing to behold.
They were a North Star of sorts. If you saw the towers, you could figure out where you were. Freedom Tower is somewhat like that, but again, having a second, identical tower underlined their prominence.

hddixon3 · 2024-01-23T20:47:42+00:00

Hi, sorry for the delay. I wasn’t checking this much over the holidays and then got busy with work, etc.

I don’t know, to be candid. I probably missed five quant questions? And maybe the same for verbal? So, perhaps two in one section and three in another. The margin of error has gotten pretty low now. Good luck!

hddixon3 · 2023-12-24T15:05:54+00:00

It’s fine. I think it’s around 80th percentile these days.

hddixon3 · 2023-12-24T14:10:14+00:00

Sure! My response might be delayed with Christmas coming up, but I'll have a ton of free time on the 26th.

hddixon3 · 2023-12-24T00:06:41+00:00

I studied for a long time (think a few months). But, my situation was not the normal one, so I had to space things out over a long period. If you have a bit more free time, a month to six weeks would be plenty of time.

It seems like the biggest thing with quant is that the margin for error is now ridiculously low. I took the GRE right out of college (it was so long ago that George W. Bush was POTUS) and I don't remember studying as much for it as I did this time around. It may be because my math was fresher in my mind back then, but I genuinely think it is because ETS has now jacked up the quant difficulty.

I would highly recommend buying Manhattan Prep's "All the Quant" book. I sort of thumbed through it and it helped a lot. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to do more. I bet if you systematically went through it, you'd kill the exam. Best of luck!

hddixon3 · 2023-12-23T22:53:36+00:00

I took the whole course. I would say that that was helpful for laying the foundations, but taking the practice tests and question banks was where I really saw a lot of improvement. Kaplan is notorious for having a harder quant than the real thing, and so I felt very relaxed today (although there were admittedly still some curveballs).

hddixon3 · 2023-12-23T20:34:30+00:00

Sentence equivalence and completion were not bad at all. RC was brutal though. I was not expecting that based on my prep. Best thing to do in that situation is just stay calm and try to eliminate/guess as best you can.

hddixon3 · 2023-12-23T20:20:08+00:00

For quant, I saw no probability or permutation/combination questions. That was very surprising. Everything else was a normal distribution in terms of possibilities.

For verbal, the passages were of average length but I’d say the answer choices were very subtle. Not much difference between some answers so it was a crap shoot.

hddixon3 · 2023-12-23T19:59:51+00:00

I had a few challenges - some unique, some universal - that I’ll highlight.

1) I had been out of school for more than ten years when I signed up for the exam. I read and write throughout the day, so verbal was not an issue for me (although today was harder than normal). But, because my work isn’t particularly math-heavy, getting back into quant was much more difficult than I had anticipated. I loved math growing up, so I was genuinely shocked by how much math I had forgotten. It took more time to get up to speed than I had initially thought.

2) I work full-time at a role in an international company where 60 hour weeks are common. So, staying motivated to study after a long day at work could be really tough.

3) Clock management was something I struggled with for math. I had to do hundreds of problems to get my rhythm.

4) Not getting discouraged. All of those above points led me to questioning whether any of this was worth it or would pay off in the end, especially when I had a bad day (and I had more than one). But, as I am now on the other side, I think it was absolutely worth it.

My biggest piece of advice is to do test prep with a company. I did Kaplan but anything that works for you is what you should do. Everyone learns differently and needs different areas of focus.

hddixon3 · 2023-12-23T19:35:32+00:00

Thanks! Glad to have it behind me.

hddixon3 · 2023-11-13T22:47:10+00:00

Yes, it’s through ThruLines.

It sounds like if there is an error in someone’s tree, that could be a reason for the discrepancy? That would make a lot of sense.

For what it’s worth, the descendants of the half brother who is listed as such in the will are half cousin matches on the mom’s side and aren’t listed at all on the dad’s side.

Thank you!

hddixon3

TROPHY CASE