Tag Archive | Physics

My Study Schedule and Week 1 Progress Report – MCAT 2015

In my last post, I talked in general about my study plan, what I planned to go back and cover in content review, and sort of the thinking behind certain aspects of the plan. Here, I want to detail the plan, partly because I’m hoping that making it public will help make me accountable. And also, if anyone reading this who is also taking the test wants to chime in or use a similar plan, that would be awesome.

To see the general plan, click here.

Now, down to the nitty gritty.

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My Study Plan – MCAT 2015

May17

So, I’ve spent a lot of time since signing up for the test trying to make a (somewhat) realistic, doable and foolproof study plan, as if such a thing could exist.

I took stock of all my old study materials, all the resources out there now, and of how I did on the Sample Test, as well as a half-diagnostic from a company called Next Step. That was interesting, sorta reflective of the official Sample Test except I did a bit lower on everything, and somehow did worse on CARS (verbal reasoning) than I did on psych/soc (which is just so weird to me because I haven’t taken those classes in over a decade and really don’t remember anything so it was mostly guessing, funny how that worked better for me than actually trying to think through the CARS section). From those two samples, I made a list of what my weaker areas are.

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A Blind Girl in Science Labs

Jul3

I belong to a lot of mailing lists for blind and visually-impaired members, including blind students, blind people interested in science and engineering, the blind of Oregon, the blind of Portland, and so forth.

One thing that comes up over and over again on these lists, especially the student and science ones, is difficulty with science labs. Maybe a student needs a year of a lab science for their general education requirements. Maybe someone wants to go into science but doesn’t know how to handle labs. Maybe the students know they can find ways to do the labs but the professors or the schools don’t.

It can be really intimidating so I thought I’d take some time to write about this here. I also think a lot of sighted people, once they see or hear about a blind person doing science labs, want to know how it’s done but might not feel comfortable asking. So this is for blind and sighted alike.

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