Release of TOEFL Seats and an Appointment with “Strangers”

At midnight, there were about 8 people talking at the same time on the MSN messenger dialog pane, words flowing as fast as river water. I have not done such an online group talking for a long time. Among these people, I only met Candid once at a GMAT activity in February and both Lettuce and Meteor, two girls that I have not contacted since then. Jubilant is someone who sent me his MSN account several days ago and who I left him some offline greetings in Japanese. The main reason that makes us get together is the unconfirmed news from NEEA about today’s release of ibt-TOEFL exam, whose seats in China is in short supply since the beginning of this year.

After a messy conversations, someone proposed we can have a “FB”, a recurrently coined Internet term which means singing in KTV or dining out with friends with one’s own money, if joining the upcoming speech about MBA career next Sunday noon. I promised to join them because I think I do need more social life and I do want to make more local Chinese friends. Among them, I am very impressed by Jubilant’s multilingual ability, versatility and colorful overseas working and life experiences. Additionally, he is only 24 years now, an age which I still stayed at university! I am convinced that the younger generation of China is very competent and has strong competitive advantage in job markets around the world.

Today's release of ibt-TOEFL seats will certainly cause a war for all Chinese students who plan to study abroad. There is no doubt that the release of this time, 25000 vacancies according to some rumor, could not meet the strong demand from the market. We will see what will happen today.

PS. While I tried to connect to the Internet to post above content, I suddenly found that there was something wrong about the connection. I was very anxiety about this because several hours later I also have to grab a seat for myself. I prompted contacting my ISP and spent about two hours working with them. Fortunately, the problem has solved. I asked the ISP lady about the possible reason for my connection problem. She told me that it might be caused by too many people using the Internet for the moment. Does that imply millions of Chinese are online waiting for the first gun shot to secure a TOEFL exam vacancy now? I can not help suspecting this possibility, because I have never encounter any Internet connection problem since this ISP provide service for me!