The Wheel and Axle

Finding Yourself On Amazon…

by on Jun.10, 2016, under My Life

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… is quite a pleasant surprise.

This pic is from http://animomedstudent.blogspot.com/. There are also quite a few blogs from premed/med students reviewing it. I didn't realize it until now.

This pic is from http://animomedstudent.blogspot.com/. There are also quite a few blogs from premed/med students reviewing it. I didn’t realize it until now.

I wrote this NMAT Reviewer (two volumes – the main reviewer plus a companion volume with extensive answers and explanations) over fifteen years ago when I was still teaching in MSA. I had a degree in Biology and had taken the NMAT as a pre-requisite for medical school, though I decided not to pursue medicine and went (initially) into teaching instead.

(That lasted all of less than a year before I decided to move into corporate as well as pursue side graduate studies in Creative Writing. That’s a story for another time.)

In any case, as part of my job in MSA, I not only taught and did review classes; I also wrote reviewers. One was co-written with others, while my boss (the late, great Mrs. Merle Alferez, who founded MSA) asked me to write the NMAT Reviewer because, at that time, nothing like it was in the market.

So I did.

I still have copies somewhere in my boxes, and it was one of my first major accomplishments post-college. It was quite a task to do a lot of research and fact-checking, and I also deliberately constructed it to be more difficult than the actual NMAT.

Thinking about it now, it does make me cringe a bit. Some of the examples I used were quite, shall we say, pop culture-y at best. I don’t want to say what it could be “at worst.” I mean, really, some of the analogy and perceptual acuity questions had references to comics and, good lord, Westlife. (I still love them to this day, however.)

That being said, it was still a pretty cool thing to have done.

I did see this still being sold in National Bookstore a couple of years ago, and it did have a note saying some updates were done by so-and-so, though I still get top credits. This is just right. Science is very progressive, and what science facts were fifteen years ago could already be updated now. I encourage this to be updated every few years and be re-reviewed for new information.

Still, I didn’t expect to see it being sold on Amazon. It’s apparently a used copy (priced strangely at what must be either an error or just greed at almost $600), but a little research showed that MSA itself already does sell its books on Amazon, including mine (at reasonable prices, and with Kindle editions, to boot).

I guess everything really is on Amazon nowadays.

In any case, it’s nice to know I’ve had impact, no matter how small, to the community across the years. I’d do it over again.

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