Here at Baymar College, we can get you prepared for the 31st Century
With advanced programming and quad rendering
And Java PlusPlusPlus scripting language
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So upgrade your gray matter, cause one day it may matter
Upgrade your gray matter, cause one day it may matter
Upgrade your gray matter, cause one day it may matter…
“Upgrade” - Deltron 3030
Hoo boy it feels good to be back! It’s been over three months since I posted my last blog “Have I Helped?”. That post was the second in what was promised to be a three part series about my first year in Rwanda. The third post was supposed to be about what I’ve learned since I’ve been in the country but, as you have no doubt seen, I have yet to deliver this high-mined reflection on a year submersed in a different culture on the other side of the world. This is because as I thought about it, I increasingly was unable to fully pin down and articulate all the things I’ve learned since I’ve been here. Additionally, a year is probably not enough time to definitely declare that I have learned this or that thing about a culture or my experience.
Peace Corps is two years long and over that span of time you realize that this experience is a lot of things: wonderful, difficult, frustrating, fun, and every other contradictory set of adjectives, all at the exact same time. To be able to condense that into a single post, then follow it up with some silly topic about sports or wasting time would have done it a disservice. And so I will save those thoughts and feelings for a rambling series of posts near the end of service in the spring or summer.
Nevertheless, I’m happy to be back and writing for fun again. This post is just a quick update for the purpose of both explaining my absence to anyone who cares, and to shake off the writing rust. If this post strikes you as scatterbrained or silly, just look at it like that first run you go on after a long weekend of drinking beers and eating ice cream. It’s gonna be tough, but you get through it so you can slide back into that groove. After this post I expect I’ll be writing Russian-novel level posts diving into the very essence of the human condition that will hold up over the ages.
Testing
But the fact that I couldn’t think of anything to write has not been the only reason I have been on hiatus for the past few months. The real reason was that I have been furiously preparing to apply to business school since July. As of the beginning of this week, I am finally done with it. Hopefully.
I say hopefully because applying to schools does not mean getting into schools. And while some of you kind people may think highly of my candidacy to these top schools, I will refer you to an objective piece of information that renders me a questionable candidate: my GMAT score.
The best way I can describe my struggle with the GMAT experience is to describe a hike I went on, soon after I arrived back in Rwanda from vacation. With a crew of close friends I was lucky to have embarked on a hike up one of the Volcanoes in northern part of the country, the Bisoke Volcano. Bisoke has an incredible crater lake at the top of it, about 12,000 ft high that offers great views and even better Instagram captions. To hike it, however, is a incredibly difficult physical experience, made even more difficult by the fact that the hiking path was stricken with mud after a long and heavy rainy season.
The way up Bisoke, I would liken to my performance on the verbal section of the test. I didn’t have the right gear, I was unprepared, but natural strength and good cardio from going on runs on my own time allowed me to get up with relative ease. My natural inclination for writing and my habit of reading had naturally prepared me, over the course of my life, to do well on the verbal part of the test without putting in the amount of effort that other people have to.
Going down the volcano on the other hand, was quite different - just as the second half of the test, the math, was also quite different.
Here, my lack of preparation and experience hiking came at a high cost. While most others had proper hiking boots, I underwent my excursion in a pair of Nike joggers which offered zero traction in the heavy mud. The entire way down the volcano, over the course of around 3.5 hours, I fell and slipped and groaned. I took heavy body shots as I lost my footing in awkward ways that didn’t allow for me to catch my fall. And each time I let loose a frustrating grunt that was so dramatic and pronounced my hiking mates eventually just started laughing at me. Oh how the mighty fall…again…and again…and again. I came to the end of the hike exhausted, covered in mud, beat up and broken. Others with the proper gear, experience, and attitude, had hardly a swipe of mud above their ankles.
My experience with the math portion of the GMAT was entirely the same. I didn’t bring the right mindset, and a lifetime spent not only avoiding, but actively loathing math problems made for a long and arduous slog with constant mistakes and failures and frustrations. I questioned my intelligence, whether or not I even wanted to go to business school, whether or not I should live in village forever and start plying my trade at making mud bricks on a cow farm. But, just as I knew when I was hiking down the mountain, I had no choice but to continue on. What, was I going quit, lay there on the path and let the mud slowly swallow me?
After I had slightly improved a bit, I had realized I hit a wall that self-studying would not be able to overcome. I needed the wonderful (read: expensive) resources that I would have found in America, or a lobotomy, to soar into the high percentile ranges that you apparently need for every school. With this mindset, I took a 12 hour bus from Kigali to Kampala, Uganda, which was the only place the GMAT was offered in the East African region. I walked on to the campus of Makerere University, ready to take on the beast.
As I walked onto the campus of Makerere University I stepped over a number of discarded flyers advertising a rally of some sort or another, and I mentally took note of the fact that students all over the world are the same - fervently protesting the ills of the world as they see them. These examples of commonality between cultures is always encouraging and heartening to see. When I finally arrived at the testing room, on the fifth floor of Makerere’s computing center, I saw what shouldn’t have surprised me - that the testing center was not quite up to our pristine American standards, to say the very least. The old PC computers were separated by a piece of glorified plywood in order to separate the testing “stations”. The massive PC towers were placed under the desk making it nearly impossible to pull up closely to the desk.
And as I sat next to an open window, crunching the numbers and trying to keep my brain from having a math meltdown, I heard the sounds of a rally - the very same rally I saw on the discarded flyers. And, given the open air, and the bullhorns, the impassioned students were using, I was able this time to figure out exactly what it was about. A god-damned Anti-Circumcision rally.
“Every 20 minutes someone is suffering from the Circumcision!”
“We must stop the circumcisions. Right now!”
Ugandans, having been colonized by the British, all speak great English but in the wonderfully colorful African accent. I heard it on full display as they battled against the grave injustice of…circumcision. I did my best to block them out and stick to my problems and focus on my timing. It was difficult, however.
“Square ABCD is circumcisioned - CIRCUMSCRIBED in the circle with center O…”
“A train leaving from City A is moving at a fast snip - CLIP. What is the velocity of the train….”
“The quadrilateral with points DICK is dissected - BISECTED….”
It was tough work. But I did the best I could. In the end, I got a score that can be reasonably portrayed as half-decent. We will see what comes of it.
A Quick Look Ahead
First comes the GMAT, then comes the application itself. This was wonderful for me, my thinking went. Getting out of the math world and back into my wheelhouse of essay writing was going to be a godsend for me. I would dazzle them with my writing flair, clever turns of phrase and big, colorful stories that no other applicant coming from fields like of tech engineering would be able to produce. And in my first essay, the Harvard essay, I was able to do just that, because there was no word limit. I thought that every subsequent essay would be a canvas on which to showcase my skills. But word limits and stodgy questions don’t make for fun writing. Instead I settled into a routine. Look at the question, overwrite the limit by about 300 words, then go back and slowly cut out anything that even slightly resembled personality, flair or fun. It was a depressing process.
Instead of the razzle-dazzle, I was relegated to formality and sterility. It was all about keeping things tight and concise. Laying out a thesis, offering supporting evidence, pointing to my leadership qualities, giving examples of how thoughtful, wonderful, delightful I am. I stuck to the snappy phrase that my high school English teacher once told me: “Tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em, Tell ‘em, then Tell ‘em what you told ‘em”.
While this formula keeps things straightforward, it also makes it dry and boring. Doing that type of writing, however, is a type of skill in and of itself and to some degree I enjoyed the challenge. But it was a far cry from the fun of writing the blog. So I’m happy to be back. If anyone wants to know how I will demonstrate my leadership qualities and personal principles to YOUR school, I’d be happy to whip you up a quick, decidedly dull essay.
So now what? God willing, all this school stuff will be sorted out in the next 3 months at the latest. I have a hygiene project in the works that I’m looking to turn my attention to, and I’m going to try my hand at farming by making a small garden on my health center compound. I’m hoping that with the rainy season upon us, the garden will show results quickly and then I can show other people how to make one. We will see. I have 9 months left in country which seems like a lot at times, and at others, not so much. I’m sure that no matter what, it will manage to fly by. With that said, thanks for sticking with me, wish me luck and I’ll see you next week for a more normal post!