By Andruw Lin

One day when I was doing schoolwork on the computer, my mother suddenly told me that I had a test coming up this weekend. It was a test for getting into a private school, and I only had three days to study. Although it was only one part of the application, it was very important to me.

Three days is a very short time, so in order to be ready, I had to be very productive. I am not a very productive person. Sometimes when I am doing my work I get distracted and go on YouTube or other websites. I also procrastinate, and I finish my work at the last day or last hour it is due. I don’t study a lot on tests, and I mostly rely on the things I receive in school.

This test was different: since there wasn’t any lecture or something like that, I had to study. It was already the afternoon of the first day, so I actually only had two and a half days left. First, my mom and my dad started looking on the internet for anything that could help such as practice tests. Meanwhile I started to look at a book that my father borrowed in my brand new Amazon Kindle.

The second day, my mom got me some practice tests, and I started filling them out. This test had five major parts. There were verbal skills, quantitative skills, reading, mathematics, and language. The second morning, I started getting distracted from the test. My brother and my sister were arguing about something in the background, and there were notifications popping on my screen. The actual time I studied was two hours when the total time I sat in front of the computer was three or four hours.

In the afternoon, I checked how much time was left. When I realized that I had little time left, I started working without getting distracted. I managed to close my notifications, and my dad took my sister and brother out. I started with verbal skills, and after checking the answer of the questions, I moved on to the next part. Once I finished all of them, I checked the answers, and I looked at what I did wrong, and what I didn’t know how to do.

Then, the next morning I did the same thing, and also looked at the book that my dad borrowed for me. In the afternoon however, my dad timed my test, since there was a time limit. I did pretty well. I finished everything within the time limit, and also I got a pretty high score.

The test was at midnight since I was in Taiwan taking the test instead of the United States. After dinner, I went to get some sleep, since I had to wake up around 11:30. I actually woke up a lot earlier than that, since I was very nervous and pictured what would happen during the test in my mind. After I woke up, I decided to study one last time. I felt pretty drowsy at first, but then thinking about the test gave me a sudden burst of energy. Finally, it was time. I clicked the zoom link, and after a little bit of loading, I finally got into the test. A teacher was explaining the rules for the test. My heart was pounding as I carefully listened to the rules, and my hands were trembling. Ten minutes later, the teacher said “Well, that is everything about the test, good luck!” So we started.