The GRE

I took the GRE this morning. I survived. I marginally conquered, even. I didn't rock its socks off, but I did well enough to not hinder my chances at getting accepted into an engineering graduate school, and that's what's really at stake. As I was studying for the test, my primary concern was with my vocabulary, but I soon discovered there were a handful of mathematical challenges that I've forgotten how to tackle. For example, what's the sum of the integers between 1 and 50? Normally, I would write a simple, single-line BeanShell script to tell me, but without the aid of scripting or GRE practice, I would have inevitably embarked upon the time consuming, brute force path. Now I know that you just take the average of the first and last integers (25.5 in this case) times the number of integers (which is equal to the last number minus the first, plus one--50). Allow me verify my standard and new found approaches with some interactive BeanShell action:

bsh % t = 0; for(i = 1; i <= 50; ++i) t+=i; print(t); bsh % bsh % 1275 bsh % print(25.5 * 50.0); 1275.0

1275. Nice. (By the way, did you know that a 30°-60°-90° triangle's sides will have lengths proportional to 1, 2, and √3?). Another area of concern I didn't initially take into consideration was stamina. This became apparent to me as I ran through a practice test, and was verified on the actual test itself. I was struggling to stay focused towards the end. Maybe my low stamina is attributable towards my disengagement from scholarly pursuits over the past five years--or maybe I wore myself out by listening to too many of DragonForce's 200bpm shred-filled epics. In any case, thank God for getting me through this and onto the next challenges that await.