<p>PART 1: VERBAL PREP & ANALYTICAL WRITING</p>
<p>Hi friends,</p>
<p>I am new to this forum and will be applying for a Masters in Health Policy & Mgmt this year. I am starting with this new thread because a) I need more posts to be able to ask questions on the forum! :) b) it will be great if the community here can make use of my insights.</p>
<p>I am a non-native English speaker and an engineer by training (Not boasting but I was always really good at math, I specifically had to work hard on improving my Verbal & Writing scores.) and many of my friends had taken the exam in recent years. I came to know from them that apart from consistent preparation, other key aspects of doing well on the test were:</p>
<p>1) focus (and luck!) on the day of exam: it is a 4-5 hour beast after all
2) not wasting time on the prep stuff that is never going to be asked (e.g. if the prep material makers came to know that comprehension passages for several students on a test-day mentioned complex words like Scopophobia or Nosocomephobia for that matter, that doesn't mean that these words become imp. enough to be memorized!!)</p>
<p>(A useful) Bottomline: you can never learn / recapitulate all the Quant & Verbal concepts you have learnt since you were a kid but what you can realistically do is to make sure that you brush up the ones that have a high probability of being asked on the GRE. What this directly implies is that under any given constraint(s), you should selectively target the areas you feel you can improve more easily as compared to what you cannot (YES, do exclude the topics which you feel will take a lot of time...).</p>
<p>So with the above idea clearly in my mind, I set a target score of 330+ for myself based on 2 month planned prep. I am an investment banker by profession so I really had to scrape my prep-time for those two months. I believe that if a lazy dork like me can do it, anybody can.</p>
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<p>Prep Material (this is purely based on personal preferences and I feel it covers most aspects for native as well as non-native test-takers): </p>
<p>QUANT: For concepts, I used Manhattan GRE booklets. That's it. Period. NO NEED TO GO BEYOND THESE! For practice: I used ETS Official GRE guide & PowerPrep Software (luckily they launched it in June for Mac as well!)</p>
<p>VERBAL: For concepts- Barron's 3500 GRE word list (I know this seems too much to some of you, I'll explain how to use this in a while), Manhattan GRE 900 words (a good gist of imp. words), Intro to Vocabulary by Norman Lewis (great book for non-native speakers to revise important words, the techniques used are impeccable and this book can actually be covered over 10-15 days if done religiously), Magoosh GRE Verbal booklet (free and really handy for last minute revision). For practice- ETS Official GRE guide & PowerPrep Software.</p>
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<p>MY VERBAL PREP:</p>
<p>I started off on a weekend (love them!) and quickly glimpsed through the entire study material (e.g. the way the prep books were designed and how long it could take me to finish a given chapter in general). Since math gets me fired up and I can actually study it even in short intervals (weird, I know), I decided to take time out especially to revise Verbal and use Quant as a filler (e.g. reading in subway/cabs, quick look during spare time in office and times when I was really tired and couldn't concentrate to my best ability as Verbal prep needs much more focus IMO, more on this below.). </p>
<p>For Verbal, I used to wake up early in the morning and read Norman Lewis (finished in 15 days) and articles in The New Yorker / The Economist or good English dailies. I used to write difficult words on sticky notes and pasted them in flash-card format on my refrigerator / window panes / desk etc. I eventually memorized around 10 new words each day from such sources only, make sure you DO NOT overdo this and restrict the number of words to <10 a day. </p>
<p>For organized prep, I picked up one GRE word list each day from Barron's 3500 and spent time with it throughout the day. In general I :</p>
<p>a) Used mnemonics e.g. for the word "eschew" (meaning to avoid): "Girls in old times followed a simple rule- Eschew the guys who chew tobacco."</p>
<p>b) NEVER read these word-lists in alphabetical order!! Try to jumble around and spice things up a bit.</p>
<p>c) Googled each word and quickly jotted down its key (and seemingly common) antonyms/synonyms in the book itself. This helps the brain in creating a network of learnt words so that when you come across them later on (say in a text or even a word list), more often than not you will be able to recall the contextual meaning of that word (something that the revised GRE focuses on a lot, magical isn't it??!!). It is enough to know that "abrogate" sounds similar to "throw/rub off" (actually means to annul) for the GRE, you don't have to write a thesis on each word.</p>
<p>d) Write down the words that gave you extremely tough time (in terms of retention) in a separate notebook and try to come back to those after 3-4 days.</p>
<p>e) For Barron's 3500 book: As I mentioned above, your job is NOT TO MEMORIZE these 3500 words but making sure that your brain has visualized as many of them as possible. Try to come up with an interesting mnemonic for each of the words but pay special attention to words that you feel are frequent / seem to be heard or read somewhere but you're not sure with the meaning / might actually be very fitting for a situation for which not many other words are there (e.g. one such word is "reciprocate"). You can leave out the names of objects / specific instances if you want but make sure that you do have an interesting mnemonic for them nevertheless. REVISE ALL THE PREVIOUS WORD LISTS WITH THEIR MNEMONICS EVERY WEEKEND (keeping them to a maximum of 15 per day). You will be amazed at how capable you can become at retaining words.</p>
<p>f) During the last week/fortnight, test yourself using the MGRE 900 word list / Magoosh booklet. You will realize that you already know most of those words! :) This will really boost your confidence a few days before the test, still keep revising and adding 10-20 new words a day.</p>
<p>g) Practice as much as you can with the comprehension passages, read long newspaper/magazine/internet articles and try to recollect on paper the key ideas and flow of information under a time-limit (deliberately choose the articles most of us would deem "boring" on the internet, especially related to science / philosophy / anything that could find a place in a heavy journal but never in your bookmarks). I can personally vouch for the fact that when the test is going on, it is a painful experience to keep on reading those long passages one after the other and solve tricky questions simultaneously, so prepare yourself for that right from the beginning.</p>
<p>h) TIME EVERYTHING. </p>
<p>i) It is perfectly OK to practice few but relevant quality questions (sticking to the books I mentioned is sufficient).</p>
<p>For Analytical writing: Just read those 30-40 odd pages in the Manhattan GRE booklets. You can't get a better primer anywhere.</p>
<p>For Quant: Information overload here, will take this up in another post in a few days! :)</p>