AndyPeckham.com

I started at 8:00 am this morning (Saturday), at the University of Montana in Missoula, and finished just after 1:00 pm.  In case you thought I completely chickened out of taking the MCAT, I actually just rescheduled it for two and a half weeks later.  Today is actually the last day it was offered for 2008.

So, how do I feel it went?  Well, I don’t feel terrible about it, and I don’t feel great about it.  Each part of the exam had some very difficult sections.  The physical science section started out easy but then had some tough physics sections dealing with topics I did not know well.  The verbal reasoning section seemed harder than the last few practice ones I did, which was discouraging, because I had been doing fairly well in VR.  I almost ran out of time on the last part, Biological Sciences, but was smart enough to skip the passage which I was getting hung up on, and then come back to it.  I took 4 practice MCAT’s this last week, and had quite a range of scores (from 31-38), so it was difficult to gauge where I was at.  The times that I scored high were times when I happened to know the topics which were covered really well, and there were few questions on the topics I didn’t know well.  I also got lucky on many of the questions I had to guess on.  Basically, I need to get at least a 30 to start being a competitive applicant.  From the way I felt during the actual test, compared to some of the practice exams, I am pretty confident that I got at least a 30.  Possibly somewhere between a 30 and 34.  But’s that’s a very subjective estimate.

Yesterday I drove here with two of my friends, Chris and Zach, who are going to MSU-Bozeman, but live here in Missoula.  I had originally thought I would have to get a hotel, but they decided to go home for the weekend and graciously offered for me to stay with one of them.  I half-heartedly tried to study some more last night, but knew it was too late to try to be adding anything to my already saturated  brain.  I have this big fat MCAT review book, but I only was able to get halfway through it.  I am sure glad that I rescheduled the test, because although I really could have used a few more weeks to study, I felt much better after studying almost 4 weeks rather than the 1 week I had studied by the time I was first planning on taking it.  Scoring better on the practice MCAT’s increased my confidence as well.

After the MCAT my friend Chris treated me to lunch, and then in the afternoon he and Zach and I went and boogie boarded on a wave in the river that goes through Missoula.  The water was cold, but it was a sunny day, and we had a blast.  I got to take a nap in the sun, and was just so happy and content being outside, in the water, after spending the entire summer in class.  Being finished with the MCAT is quite a relief–I feel like a big weight has been lifted off my back, and now I can catch up for the first two weeks of class I’ve had.

And now I have to wait a whole THIRTY DAYS before I find out how I did on the exam!  I think that is ridiculous, considering it was all done on a computer, and it was all multiple choice except for two essays I wrote.  I really, really do not want to have to take this exam a second time.  In this whole process of preparing for the MCAT, which is basically the culmination of the whole last year’s work (48 credits), I have repeatedly felt like God has been asking me, “Do you trust me?”  Do I trust that regardless of my MCAT score or whether I get accepted into medical school that He is in control and that his plan for my life is better than my own?

29 days and counting…