I hereby declare this Burger Week.

I've been randomly logging into my GRE account once a day for the past couple of days, wondering if my essay scores will be posted up early. Usually, it's blank. After a few times of seeing the blanks, I started to expect seeing the blanks. Tonight, I logged on and saw numbers in those blanks!

Verbal Reasoning - 161.
Quantitative Reasoning - 151.
Analytical Writing - 6.0.

Wait, what?! 6.0? OMG. I was totally taken aback! I already knew my Verbal and Quant scores, so they were no surprise - although having scored below average for math was a little disheartening, but the essay score was what I was really checking for. The minimum score I needed was 4.0 out of a maximum score of 6.0.

I've dreamt about my essay score, hoping I would get at least 4.0. Everyone says 4.0 is the "usual good writer" score - decent, fair, good enough, that kinda score. If you get a 5.0 or 5.5, you're really good. If you get a 6.0, well, that's just unfreakingbelievably outstanding. And I'm not outstanding - well, I don't think I am! - so, I'm just gonna say that I got really lucky!

Lucky and happy. :D Hopefully my essay score will make up for my tragic math score.

I have to admit, I'm also really happy about the essay score in itself - without even considering its implications for graduate school. I'd always hoped I was a good writer, but then I read the works of a million and one better writers, and I know I'm nowhere nearly as well-read or as insightful as these other minds. But at the same time, I worked hard practising writing over 50 essays - to make sure I got the timing right, to make sure I knew how to organize 700-word essays in 30 minutes, and I think that hard work actually paid off! The best part is that I actually had fun writing the essays during the exam, so ...