My experiments with TOEFL - Day 5

I really dint do anything with regard to TOEFL today. Two reasons:
1. I'm really doing well, apart from the listening part
2. I am sure I'd get somewhere around the same score in Listening if i take the second test without my headfones.

So i plan to bring the headfones from office tomorrow night and take the second test. And then it will be off to the test center. Hoping another good show.

I started working on my essays. Started with Chicago, as they are my most complete essays since they were written last. All the essay writing wisdom i had gained over the last 1 month or so had gone into these last set of essays and i really like the Career Progressions essay i had written for Chicago. So i worked on this essay and boy it was tough. Stuff like word counts and bigger picture and the complete profile and everything else comes around to haunt the essay writer at this point. I had a first hand experience of all this today.

I finished working on the Chicago first essay right on time when my reviewer sent me the entire Chicago packet - reviewed. I then incorporated all her comments and modified my new essay based on that. I guess i am done with this essay atleast. But still - this is gonna go through two more reviews before i finalize it. Once the Chicago essay was done, i moved on to Kellogg Career progression essay. While Chicago is 1500 words, Kellogg says 2 pages, which is around 1000 words. Spent some time to recollect the Kellogg complete picture and then got finished with this. Then i moved onto the Wharton Career progress essay which is the same 1000 words as Kellogg is. But the entire Wharton essay packet is so compact that it had to have one incident more than my Kellogg career progression essay.

This was pain - i still haven't been able to shrink the Wharton essay to a reasonable number of words. The Chicago and Kellogg essays are kind of okay. But Wharton was very difficult. Jus when i was fighting with the words, another applicant i am working with called me to say that the strategy has to change now. What she said made life a bit easy and more sense. So i have dropped working on Wharton tonight - will get back to it after i finish my test tomorrow.

So - i feel like i am on the last lap of a long long marathon. I still have to get my Recos done, fill my online apps and finish my essays. This TOEFL is eating up some time for sure. I'm waiting to get done with it ASAP and work full time on these stuff. I want to finish all this by end of this month and concentrate on fine tuning and submitting the apps all thru October.