Life Update: UCAT, UCAS and Other

Since the easing of lockdown, very little has changed. At this time I would be on holiday for a month hanging with mates. Alas.

Nonetheless, my focus has shifted from end of year exams to UCAT. If you've seen my previous post you may be able to infer that I suck at UCAT. Well, I initially sucked a lot, went through a period of actually doing really well, and now I just suck a bit less. I think what I need to improve on is consistency. On average I will get 700 for each section, but as a raw mark I either get 600 or 800, which averages out to be about 700. Consistency is key here. I'm actually surprised at how abstract reasoning is going. I thought I'd either suck at it forever or suddenly improve. It seems I am experiencing a mixture of these two, which one is dependent on which test. Verbal reasoning- I thought I was pretty decent. I've always scored pretty well in it but now I am not. I think I read words but don't take any of it in or trying to search for a keyword and therefore I'm having to look back over and waste time. This sounds like I am sacrificing time for accuracy. Nope. Bad at accuracy and bad at timing. Decision making's not been terrible. I think I am getting the hang of it. I thought I was insane at it when I went through a period of getting almost full marks. And ditto with quantitative reasoning. Now I simply suck at both. I think there's a problem with situational judgement. You get these obvious situations where there is clearly a very right and very wrong thing to do. In every other situation there is so much nuance and the reasoning that they take to get the conclusion always contradicts other similar situation. Alas.

I find writing about myself really easy. I blitzed through a first draft of my personal statementin about an hour of continuous work. This is pretty unusual since I normally work in 10 minute intervals. Then I had a quick look through, viciously cut down my character count, did a bit more editing and I was done. A couple weeks later I decided it was trash so I wrote draft 2 which was basically a new and improved version of draft 1. But man, the character limit really sucks. I'm planning to write a paragraph on my research of dentistry, which I have not done yet but I've already gone past the character limit. Oh well. I think the best way to write a personal statement is just to constantly iterate.