Halfway done

Two exams down, two to go.  I went to school on Monday to drop off my graduation form, and to pick up my graduation costume.  A classmate overheard me talking about my costume, and politely informed me that the correct term is "regalia."  When I got home though, I tried it all on, with all of the stoles, medals, and cords for various student organizations, plus the doctoral hood and beanie, and all of it together definitely amounts to a costume.  No laughing at me at graduation!

It's 9:30 a.m., and my first exam begins at 3 p.m.  Normally, I'd be a little disappointed that all of my exams were at 3 p.m., because I'm more of a morning person, and 3 p.m. is definitely not my most alert time of the day.  However, since I have all of my exams back to back, I'm grateful for the study time in the morning.  

I'm also thinking that having all of these exams back to back will be good practice for how exhausted I'll feel during the bar exam.  One of my professors last semester recommended that I take a full course load this semester, so I wouldn't get a case of 3L-itis leading up to the bar (where you don't take enough classes, and have lots of free time).  By Friday evening, I'll have had about 12 to 16 hours of exams, which is comparable to the amount of time I'll spend in the Convention Center in July over the course of two days.

Back to my final cramming, wish me luck!

Final Finals

Tomorrow I start my last week of finals as a law student (yes, I will have finals next year during my LL.M., but I don't want to think about those right now).  I have all four of them back to back, so the professors have time to grade them to make sure I can really graduate.  Luckily, I'm pretty sure I will pass all of the finals, although I only need to pass two in order to graduate.  Unfortunately, I've put a little more pressure on myself to do better than just passing, because my g.p.a. is .02 away from graduating at a higher level of honors than I'm at right now.  I should just be content with where I am, because I really haven't put in the type of work that should be required to graduate from law school with honors any higher than what I'm at.

Okay, back to studying before Joe notices that I'm playing on the internet and not reviewing Wills.

Mid-studying 36 hour Puerto Rican Adventure

I chose to take the more local bar prep class, instead of the Big Commercial Bar Prep Course That Everyone Else Takes, because I think I'll prefer live lectures to videotaped. It's amazing to me that these companies can get away with charging over $2500 for the privilege of sitting in a room for four hours a day watching videotapes. If I wanted to watch videos all summer, I would go to two movies per day in the theater, for five days a week, and pay the premium price of $10 per movie. So that's $100 per week ($20/day x 5 days/week), which is roughly $400-$500 per month. If I did that for three months, I would pay a total of $1500, which is still significantly cheaper than even the bar prep course I'm taking. I know a lot more about law school than I do film, but I'm willing to bet that it's a lot more expensive to make a major motion picture than it is to make a video for a bar prep course, yet it's a lot cheaper to go to the movies than it is to bar prep.

Anyway, my point is that my bar prep class is smaller and more personalized. As soon as I paid my deposit last week, I got an e-mail from the VP letting me know that if I had any questions about my study schedule, I should contact them. I immediately e-mailed them to find out the "expert/professional" opinion on just how detrimental it would be to my bar prep to go to Puerto Rico for a weekend in late June to go to my best friend's wedding. I got a long response yesterday, that concluded by the VP telling me he thought I should go to the wedding, which was the response I wanted, but not the response I expected. So I went ahead and bought my ticket, and I'll be in Puerto Rico for about 36 hours. I'm thinking of it as a scoping out trip, to decide if it's somewhere I want to go on a real vacation.

P.S. I had my last real law school class today. Yay!

Last week of classes

It's hard to believe that I'll be finished with law school in less than two weeks, I'll graduate in under three weeks, and I'll take the bar exam a little over three months from now. I'm probably one of very few law students who actually enjoyed law school. I think part of the reason I liked law school so much is that I realized pretty quickly that I made the right decision to attend. In undergrad, I always wondered what I would do with my German major, due in part to my refusal to ever really master the grammar (I'm still not totally sure of when I should use accusative or dative, and still not overly concerned about it). 

I still feel like I have a lot to do in the next two weeks, so graduation doesn't feel real yet. Even though there's a lot to get done, I'm looking forward to seeing my family and celebrating the new initials.

Back on track

Today was much better than yesterday. The weather is great, the spa was just what I needed, and I didn't have classes. I think yesterday was one of the more unpleasant days I've had in my law school experience, which is pretty much saying law school has been good for me, and I had to experience a few more annoyances before I left. We will now return to our regularly scheduled programming, which may be sporadic until exams end on May 2.

It's just one of those weeks when everything's going wrong. My laptop is toast, my car is having issues, and then I had to pay the remaining balance for my bar prep class. The computer incident is a minor setback in my bar application, and everything else that requires a computer. Luckily, I have a back-up laptop that seems to be working alright, and I was able to recover my class notes and bar application from my regular computer before it totally crapped out.

Final exams start in two weeks, and since it's one of those weeks, all I really want to do is scream. I'm pretty sure that's all it would take to make me feel at least a little bit better. Unfortunately, apartment living isn't conducive to screaming, so instead, I just feel like my head is going to explode. If I'm this stressed out, annoyed, and frustrated with everything now, how am I going to make it through the next three months? At least I don't have classes tomorrow, and I'm taking advantage of spa week to have a spa morning with a friend, and then an afternoon in the library writing a paper.

Rumor on the streets is that I'll have to study a little more for this exam than I have ever studied for an exam before. Just how much will I have to study though? Well, according to one visiting bar prep instructor, here's one plan for success:

May 10: celebrate graduating from law school with family and friends.

May 11: sleep off celebratory hangover

May 12 to Memorial Day weekend: study six to eight hours a day.

Memorial Day weekend to July 4: study 12 to 14 hours a day. During this time, my 3.5 hour per day bar prep course begins. I forget whether he counted these hours toward the total number of hours per day or not.  

July 4 until 48 hours before the exam (July 29 & 30): study 16-18 hours a day. Every waking hour should be spent studying. I don't think I'm normally awake for 16 hours a day.

So, as you can see from this schedule, you probably won't be seeing much, if any, of me, until August. I apologize in advance for the weddings and events I can't attend. I hope everyone will understand that this is the most important exam that I will ever take, and that I've pretty much made a $100,000 bet that I'll pass. In the event that you don't understand, don't ever come looking for free legal advice from me!

Is Gordon Ramsay available to help me pass the bar?

I started watching Hell's Kitchen recently, which is a pretty ridiculous cooking competition show.  I prefer Top Chef, but Hell's Kitchen has a bit more flair.  I was hooked the first week of the show when Gordon Ramsay, the hot shot chef/host of the show, tasted each competitor's specialty dish, and hated one dish so much that he started dramatically spewing into a strategically placed trash can.  

The subsequent episodes haven't been quite as (unintentionally?) hilarious, but they basically consist of Gordon Ramsay running around the kitchen, screaming and swearing in everyone's faces about how inadequate they are.  Anyway, I don't know if I'd seriously want someone like Gordon Ramsay to teach my bar prep class and scream the law in my face until I was about to cry, but I think I'd be pretty motivated to study more if my bar prep instructor took one look at my MBE (multiple choice section of the bar) and started dramatically vomiting all over the place.  

Bar application

Now that I'm nearly finished with law school, one of the only things left standing between me and the bar exam is the bar application.  Maryland has an extremely detailed application, that wants to know where I've lived for the past ten years (Mom and Dad, if you're reading this, I'll be calling soon to double check all my information), my complete certified driving records for the past three years (which for me includes three different states), and every bank/credit/loan account that I've maintained in the past five years.  My advice to anyone considering going to law school:  Don't open that store credit card, use it for one purchase, and then close it or just stop using it.  That great discount is only going to complicate things 4 years later when you're staring at your credit report trying to figure out what's on it.  The application also requires that I depend on a lot of other personal references, past employers, my high school, and two Maryland references to fill out some forms and return them in a timely manner to the character committee.  

The final application deadline is May 20, so I'll be focusing my next few weeks on finishing up the application.  I think the complex application process is just one more way they try to weed people out.  It's almost working for me!  

Hi

This summer, I'll be suffering through the bar exam with approximately 100,000 other attorney-hopefuls.  The bar exam, according to the bar prep dude (thanks to the low bar passage rate at my school, we get free bar prep during the spring of our 3L year), has the lowest passage rate of any standardized test.  I'm going to try blogging through the bar prep process so my family and friends can see what I'm up to, and hopefully understand a little better what I'm doing.  

I'm taking the Maryland bar, in case you were wondering.