NO maternal support, part 2

Well to be quite honest, I've been dealing with this lack of support thing from my Mom since I flunked out of college in '87. And right now, I'm not all that comfortable providing too many details about the situation, suffice it to say that I'll just have to work a little harder to tune out her opinion than I have in the past. And that unfortunately, our relationship will very likely NEVER be the same now that I'm crystal clear about where my academic goals stand with her.

Moving on, my MCAT prep is at all time high, and again to sound like a broken record, fine tuning my verbal strategies has been critical to my success in both Bio and Chem. I've also realized that many of the Bio questions are answered from the info in the passage so if you don't do things like intrepret info from graphs well, you're gonna be toast. In the past, I'd been relying on my knowledge base to get me through and that was some what of a mistake given my gaols of scoring 10+. Sure knowing things like where in the krebs cycle NADH is produced is helpful, but not if you're not also able to answer questions like how changes in the pH of the inner mitochondrial membrane can affect it's function. THESE are the types of questions I hadn't focused as much on in the past but because of my decision recently to focus on verbal FIRST in my MCAT prep, I've been able to address comprehension/application type questions and score well on ALL my practice tests lately.

And here's an embarassing fact. The AMCAS exam 1 is the SAME exam I took in 1991 and scored ~17 on (or was it a "15")? I'd been partying VERY late the night before (stupid) and obviously didn't prepare well before the exam. So far, I'm acing this exam and while I'm aware I can't count this as a legitimate "score" and this is the easiest of all the AMCAS exams, it's telling to me and indicative of my improvement that I've aced everyting except the PS section which I didn't take yet, and my score is 11+ in both the verbal and BS. The last time I took this exam in 2002, my score was an overall "26". In other words, I've only completed the verbal and bio section (which I haven't even completed preparing for yet) and already I've scored much higher than I did on the real thing. D*&N!!!!

At any rate, while the "score" isn't "real" the improvement IS real, and that's my PRIMARY concern these days!!!