Despite the fact that it’s summer, I’ve been getting more and more stressed out and nervous as it draws to an end. There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, once summer finishes I’ll be a senior, and that scares the shit out of me — especially because I know that afterwards I’ll have to leave everyone and everything to go to grad school. Secondly, the end of summer will mark Ana’s departure for her semester in the Middle East, and I’m going to miss her terribly for the next four months. And thirdly, the day before classes start again is the day that I take the GRE.

My philosophy about standardized tests in general (and the SAT and GRE in particular) has been that I should go into them without studying, to provide an accurate representation of my abilities as a student. Of course, this doesn’t make much sense in a society where virtually every student obsesses over these tests and tears through dozens of study guides and practice tests for years before actually taking the tests. I’m putting myself at somewhat of a disadvantage, but the idealist in me refuses to let me study for them. And that worked extremely well on the SAT. When I signed up for the GRE, I told myself I wouldn’t study for it because, being a math major, the math section won’t be too hard, and I’ve never really had a problem with vocabulary and essay-writing, so I wasn’t too worried about the other sections.

However, I’ve looked at a few random practice problems on the net, and some have very nearly made me shit myself. It seems that they pick the most obscure words the English language has to offer. Being a math major is apparently as much a curse as it is a blessing: I haven’t taken the kinds of classes that require lots of reading and, therefore, lots of exposure to obscure words. I want to start studying, but I can’t bring myself to do it during summer break.

To make everything worse, when I signed up for the GRE I thought I had made sure to take it the day before classes start, so that I wouldn’t have to think about it with a full course load also on my plate. However, I was looking at my note to myself yesterday, and noticed that the date I had written was actually the same day classes start. I wasn’t sure if I’d written this by mistake, or if I’d accidentally scheduled myself for the wrong day. I checked the ETS website and found that it costs $50 to reschedule (although the few days before classes start are now completely booked) and that if you cancel your appointment, you only get a 50% (or $70) refund. I tried to log in to the site to check the date of my exam, but the only way to do that was with a confirmation number they had failed to email me. It was too late to call their hotline, so all night and all day at work I was stressing over the decision I thought I’d have to make: do I skip four classes on the first day, or do I pay ETS a large chunk of cash to reschedule my exam to sometime during first semester?

I had to wait until work to call them, and I found out that, thankfully, I had simply written down the wrong date: my exam is actually scheduled for the day before classes. Of course, that means it’s one day closer than I’d thought, and thus one less day I can study — or put off studying.