Help! Running into a Wall on Week 2

Dear startup2017,

My friend, I'm happy to respond.

First of all, I will recommend a couple blogs.
How to Study for GMAT Math
Number Sense for the GMAT
Practicing mental math as much as possible is crucial.

Here's what I am going to say--and this is hard medicine. Keep practicing math: even though you are only 1/10 the way through the Magoosh math lessons, keep doing math questions faithfully. I don't want you to stop because you are making mistakes. Instead, I want you to learn from your mistakes. See:
Studying for the GMAT: Learning from Your Mistakes
Ideally, you would keep an error log for math (keeping an error log is discussed in that blog article). This way, for each and every question you get wrong, you would force yourself to articulate what information you were missing, how you would have approached the problem if you had known that, what you need to remember, etc. You see, when you force yourself to write all this in words, you are creating connections between the "math parts" of your brain and the "words parts," and anything that creates connection between different regions of the brain results in deeper learning. Of course, if you get, say, a statistics question wrong now, and write down the statistics factoid you were missing, you won't have any kind of mastery just from that, but later in the study plan, you will get to the statistics lessons, and that point, you will have enough points of reference that you will be able to assimilate all the information in those videos at a much deeper level. Students tend to overestimate the importance of simply getting the information in front of them, and they wildly underestimate the importance of everything one can do to learn it deeply. There are a ton of good sources out there--I would estimate that 60-70% of the GMAT test takers have access to all the information they would need for a top 5% performance, but of course, only 5% can pull off that level of performance. All the information is those Magoosh lessons, but don't underestimate everything you need to do to make that information your own.

It takes tremendous patience and dedication to do all of this, but since you are starting almost from scratch with math, it really will take this thorough approach to get you to a high level of performance. In a way, it takes a different perspective. When you get only 2/12 DS questions correct, it doesn't mean that you are hopelessly behind or stuck or wrong or worthy of being taken out back & shot; instead, each question you get wrong is an opportunity to learn and reflect, so you have ten such opportunities in that that. It may sound odd, but if you can get to the point of being genuinely grateful for each math question you get wrong, you will be close to getting everything you can out of each mistake.

It's great that you have the MGMAT books--those are fantastic. If you watch the Magoosh lessons, and work through the MGMAT books, you will hear each idea in two different ways, which again promotes deeper understanding. It's great that you are a news junkie: that will serve you exceptionally well on the GMAT Verbal.

As concerns which edition of the GMAT OG to use--for the questions in the book, there's not much difference. The questions in the 2013 OG are perfectly fine, and you would only need a later edition if you exhausted the questions the earlier OG. The one thing that concerns me is access to Integrated Reasoning official practice questions. Your OG should have a code in the back and an http address: check that out. If that doesn't give you access to a bank of 50 IR question, then you may have to get a more recent OG to get access to that website with the official IR practice questions. My friend, do not underestimate the importance of Integrated Reasoning. Especially for someone who got a non-mathy undergrad degree, a strong performance on the IR is a powerful statement. You are precisely the kind of student who has the most to gain from an impressive IR score. BTW, if you get the 2017 OG for the IR website, do the questions in both editions of the OG--there's probably about 50% overlap, and the rest of the questions are different.

Does all this make sense?
Mike