Exams went pretty well, apart from some minor technical difficulties that lasted for a few panic-stricken minutes. About an hour after finishing my con law exam, I got an email saying the exam file did not upload successfully. But that panic didn’t even come close to how I felt during my property exam when my netbook decided it didn’t feel like loading the exam software. They started the exam without me and then I had proctors trying to help me re-download the exam and re-run the program. I was terrified they were going to tell me I would have to hand-write the exam. That really would have been the end of the world as I knew it. There would be no way I could write a coherent exam by hand. I would fail for sure. But fortunately, my computer got over its bout with PMS and decided to work third time around. They gave me compensatory time so it didn’t even matter in the end.

It really feels incredible to be done with 1L. It went by ridiculously fast. I can remember one year ago looking at the glossy brochure that came in the admission packet. Every now and then I would flip to the last page and stare at the fresh-faced CLS grads decked out in their blue robes looking happy and accomplished. I couldn’t wait till that day. I still can’t. But now instead of it being three years away, it’s only two.

But since I just finished exams only today and haven’t really had time to adequately reflect, I’ll save the deep and meaningful reflection for my next – and final! – post.

I have jury duty next week. I postponed it once already so there’s no getting out of it this time. The last time I was called I was living in Massachusetts and I think it was really close to finals then too. I got out of it by telling them I had family members who were in law enforcement. Hopefully that works this time around too. I actually think I would really like to do jury duty, but it never seems to come at a convenient time, does it?

After the writing competition is over, I have one whole week of vacation before starting my internship. I’m not going anywhere, but there’s plenty to do in the city. Item number one is to repair all the friendships that have suffered as a result of my falling off the face of the planet for the month of May. So many calls have gone unreturned and emails unanswered. Most of my friends are not law school people so they don’t really understand what I was going through. As readers here know, law school exams are unlike anything and if you’ve never experienced them you can’t really understand. So I didn’t really bother to try to explain. I just let them know I’d be off the map until late May.

Congratulations to everyone who finished 1L. ☺

I came out of the con law exam feeling spent but pretty good overall. Ever take an exam and have one of those moments where you map out your whole answer, feel awesome about it, and then realize – oh holy crap, I completely forgot this Incredibly Important Thing? Yeah, I had one of those. At first it was like – whew! That was a close one! Then it was like – well, Jesus – if I had forgotten THAT, I’d be fast-tracking it to C+ land. And then it was like – well what the hell else am I forgetting??

Crim law was a different story altogether. I had certain expectations going into the exam, which was probably my first mistake. Based on the past exams I thought I had an idea of what to expect, but I was wrong. The questions weren’t exactly unfamiliar, but I expected the layout of the exam itself to be different. What’s more, there wasn’t a suggested time limit for each question, which threw me for a bit of a loop. It has been my experience so far that professors generally put suggested time limits for each question and that signals which questions are weighted more heavily than others and thus where you should spend the bulk of your time. Without time limits, I can only assume the questions are weighted equally which terrifies me a bit considering I spent way more time analyzing two questions than I spent on the other. They also had more parts so I find it hard to believe each question could possibly be weighted the same.

I walked out of that exam feeling completely and utterly spent. I walked back home practically zombified. My mind was blank and I felt incapable of higher thought. I got into my apartment and sat down at my computer and couldn’t really remember the walk back from school.

I hadn’t planned to, hadn’t wanted to, but I ended up taking the night off and curled up in bed watching a few stupid movies.

My approach to exams this semester is the exact opposite of what I did last semester. Last semester I was attentive and present and engaged in classes and by the time finals rolled around, I wasted a lot of time and didn’t study very hard. This semester I tried the opposite approach. I skipped a lot of class, hardly ever volunteered, and kept up with the reading in only half my classes. But now that exam time is here, I am studying my brains out. Literally.

I’m completely isolated. I hate studying at the law school (I know, I’m a broken record on this point) so now that I have my air conditioner installed (thanks Dad!) I’ve been holed up in my apartment for days on end emerging only to take an exam or print something. I made a bunch of food before classes ended and subsisted on that, but now my fridge is running on empty. I’ve tapped into the emergency rations – canned soap, oatmeal, and a box of raisins I didn’t know I had. I’m out of soda except for a half a bottle of Diet Stewart’s Root Beer, which I’m saving for when I need a jolt of caffeine-infused happiness.

But it’s almost over. I can see the end in sight.

In other news, this past weekend was a blast. Since everyone turned in the brief, we all decided it was time to take a brief (haha) hiatus from working on law school and go out and have some fun. Bar review was pretty amazingly fun and it was nice to see people come out of their shell a little bit just before buckling down one last time to deal with the hazing that is 1L year. Plus, next weekend is Law School Prom, which is going to be amazing. My girlfriend couldn’t make it out, since the event was not very brightly planned on the same weekend as Mother’s Day, but I managed to find myself a plutonic date for the evening (or, she managed to find me). Speaking of my girlfriend, things are progressing pretty well. We’ve been talking pretty much every day and I think things are starting to get pretty serious, which is both kinda scary and kinda exciting all at the same time. Considering she still lives very far away, we’ll have to see where things go from here, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see her out here in Chicago sometime in the not so distant future.

Let’s see ….. we also have some kind of training coming up from the Career Services Office about the Fall OCI. To be honest, I think it’s going to be a huge waste of time (the training, not OCI). I think I’m more partial to the advice I’ve been given by 2Ls and 3Ls instead of the Career Services people. Many of them seem like they are just there to placate students and make them feel like everything is going to be all right. It’s not their fault. Prior to this economic downturn, they didn’t have to do much of anything. Now that things are tough, it definitely seems like they’re trying to scramble to come up with ideas on how to: 1) continue to get Chicago students the same kind of jobs at the same rate (which is impossible); and 2) continue to make sure students think Chicago students get the same kind of jobs at the same rate. So far, they’ve been mildly successful with our class in Goal #2, though most of us are starting to wise up … and some of us are starting to get more and more worried as more and more grades come out.

Anyway, we’re not all as special and unique as our Mom’s all told us we once were. Or, at least, I’m not. Here’s to mediocrity.

Still, it was nice to see my various technologies (phone, Gmail inbox, Facebook wall) flooded with well wishes. And in all fairness, I did celebrate my birthday with friends on Friday night at a great little bar down in SoHo where the drinks are cheap and huge. From what I remember, it was a great time.

26 doesn’t feel all that much different from 25. I’m not old – despite what some of my law school classmates have said – but I am definitely closer to 30 than 20 now. 25 was the real turning point in my life though. I had just gotten my acceptance letter to CLS and for the first time in my life I felt really sure about myself and what I was doing. One year later I’m even more confident with my life plans and about seeing them through to fruition. 26 is going to be an excellent year, I can feel it.

Classes finished up yesterday but 1L isn’t over until exams are over. Or maybe until the writing competition is over. I have two exams next week (con law and crim law) and then two the week after (property and my elective). The day after my last exam is when the writing competition packet will be available. The deadline is a week later and then I have about a week of vacation before starting my internship.

Tomorrow night they’re doing a midnight pancake breakfast which gives me all the warm fuzzy feelings of undergrad. But, unlike undergrad, to enjoy said breakfast would involve walking 10 city blocks from my apartment back up to school in the middle of the night. It probably won’t happen unless I break my habit of self-inflicted hermitude and try something radical – like studying in the law library. I don’t see it happening though. I like to have all my creature comforts around me when I study – food, comfy clothes, my cat, and enough Coke Zero to power a small vehicle.

Oh, and congratulations to the CLS Law Revue whose video It’s the Law of Crime is an ATL finalist! I think they performed this song at the PILF Auction, but without the benefit of subtitles, much of the wit was lost on me. I think it’s great – no bias here. So go vote for it.

All right, it’s back to the grind, I suppose. I’ll probably finish up my con law outline tonight and then try to figure out exactly what to do with it. How does one even study for a con law exam?

Happy studying, everyone.

The result: in a matter of days, I tried to relearn all the principles and such I should have learned over the past two quarters. Hornbooks, supplements, etc. helped me along the way although I’m not really sure how much good it did. I probably studied for over 12 hours a day for the last week or so straight. Then yesterday came the first of our two exams for this quarter: contracts. All I can say is, thank god I read through all that crap, otherwise I would have literally been floundering — drowning in a sea of nearly indecipherable facts that pointed really in no direction. As it was, I was still flailing for answers, which is fine I suppose considering how everyone I’ve talked to mentioned how hard they thought the exam was (from both professors). In any case, finals really really suck. And more often than not, professors do little to help. In fact, they more often than not steer you in a direction throughout the quarter that in no way leads to the end result. Classes are devoted to things that will have: 1) no bearing on your grade (and therefore, career possibilities), and 2) no bearing on working in the legal field at all. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but law school is probably the most unique experience in …. futility? …. I’ve ever witnessed. All the work goes to nowhere and if you happen to understand a concept presented, guess what? You can bet everyone else (who is at least as smart as you, if not 10x smarter) gets it at least as well as you do if not 10x better.

Anyway, maybe I’m just overworked and overstressed at the moment. But only one exam left to go and then Saturday is like the unofficial St. Paddy’s day in Chicago when they dye the river green and such. So basically, my inner-Irishmen in coming out in full force for pretty much the entire weekend (if not all of our two-week break).

To add to this idealism of becoming a lawyer, so many law schools publish radically skewed statistics regarding employment and salaries of graduates, in an effort, I guess, to recruit young graduates to come to their school and fund their programs via the extremely high tuition payments I mentioned in my last post.

To be honest, it is very disturbing to me how some institutions are able to influence young people into giving over tens of thousands of dollars (perhaps over $100K or $150K) in loans, which cannot be bypassed by filing for bankruptcy, in return for a law degree that perhaps will not further their career goals much more than if they had foregone law school altogether. There seems to be a certain amount of preying on eager young adults and it seems that perhaps some kind of regulation or oversight is necessary.

There may be some fairly strict ABA policies in place now that limit the amount of increase in accredited schools, but maybe more is needed. For instance, maybe some schools just need to be shut down (in the extreme), or maybe there should be some oversight body that ensures schools are distributing realistic employment statistics and data that actually reflects a graduate’s prospects. Again, given the state of the legal market, the environment may be ripe for producing a significant portion of our generation (or perhaps 5-10 years) of graduates entirely and quite literally lost in debt. The buck has to stop somewhere and I find it very troublesome to place that responsibility on those just beginning their professional lives when so much more could be done by those with much more experience and with much more control in their, as well as others’, professional lives.

Also, grades came out. Earlier in the year, I think some upperclassman sent out an email something to the effect of: “Don’t worry 1Ls. Somewhere in the wilderness when you were born, a wolf howled and there and forever determined your law school GPA.” How true. I don’t want to say that all law schools grades are entirely random so as not to discredit anyone’s hard work and persistence (especially those with really good grades), but I will say this: remember that Elements class that I was so sure to fail in??? Yeah, somehow, someway, I managed to get an A. So, once again, law school grades are, as far as I am concerned, random.

This is no ordinary mouse.

I was at a Christmas party last night a few blocks away and the host, my friend James, gave me a couple glue traps he’d picked up from Metro Pest Control. You can even close them up so they make a little tunnel so you don’t have to look at the victim struggling for life. Hey, I didn’t want it to come to this! I thought the mouse would just submit to the snap trap and die instantly and with a little dignity. But nooooooo! It had to cleverly thwart my diabolical efforts to kill it. I’m very curious to know how it managed to eat the peanut butter – and all of it at that! – without springing the trap. Seems like quite a risky business for just a little peanut butter.

Anyway, I had my civil procedure exam yesterday. Logistically, I was a wreck. I didn’t find out the exam was at 3PM (as opposed to 10AM) until midnight the night before. When I got to Greene a half hour before test time, I glanced at the room assignment board and saw I was in the wrong building. So I double-timed it back to Warren, walked into the room, and finding no one there, walked right back out. I looked at the room assignment board in the lobby of Warren and saw that I had looked at the room assignment for people hand writing the exam. So I ran back to Greene. Luckily, there were still plenty of good seats available.

All throughout exam season I had been working off the assumption that this particular exam was a four-hour in-class test. Apparently all of us thought that because when the proctor wrote on the board that it was in fact a three-hour exam, people started freaking out. As far as I was concerned, three hours was better than four because that was one less hour I had to spend writing the exam. But that was only a good thing so long as our professor had written a three-hour exam. So someone had to be sent out to double check. It turned out that he had written a three-hour exam and we were all just wrong.

After the three hours raced by, I felt pretty good about the exam. It seems that I’m having the opposite law school experience from most 1Ls I know. They were all positively giddy after the torts exam. I wanted to die. They all commiserated about the ridiculousness of civ pro. But I loved it.

I think the key to happiness in 1L year is to live nowhere near the law school, never spend a second there that you don’t have to, and spend all your free time with people who are not in law school.

Anyway, I had one 8-hour take-home exam and one 3-hour in-class exam. The in-class exam was pretty much a blur. My preparation for it consisted of making my own outline, reviewing other outlines (previous students’ who had my professor, not commercial ones), skimming through a hornbook/E&E, and taking all the posted exams from past years while reviewing the professor’s memos and past student answers. So even though the 3 hours was a blur, it was a prepared blur. But I will say this: even though I had been under timed conditions at home with these past exams, when I finally got into the test room itself, my heart was pounding and the first five minutes or so was a struggle to fight off nervousness and prepare a rough outline of my exam answer.

I thought some of the issues to spot were a little difficult and sophisticated such that maybe some students missed some things, but perhaps I was also looking too hard or in-depth at things. Honestly, I probably addressed certain aspects of questions that could have either been acknowledged or dismissed much more easily (a mistake on my part and my time constraints were therefore heightened). Nonetheless, I feel ok about it and am just trying to keep hope alive for a median grade.

As for the 8-hour take home, this was a but more relaxing and laid back. I didn’t really do much additional studying for this test than I had done over Thanksgiving break, which consisted solely of me making an outline. I did manage to do some group studying, but found these sessions to be hugely inefficient (but maybe there is something to be said for in-depth discussion of issues among groups of people). All in all, the second half of the exam period was actually pretty relaxing. As for the exam itself, we had a word limit and so I spent the latter part of the exam period just trying to shorten my answer — hyphenated words, contractions, shortened and less eloquent sentences, etc.

One last interesting note is this: law school is so unique, I feel. In undergrad, what you learned in class was what was tested (save for perhaps some assigned out-of-class documents to be read). Here, it seems almost the polar opposite. Classes are often largely devoted to heady policy discussions, philosophical debates, economic considerations, etc. But the exam asks: “What is the rule? Apply it here.” While it might help to know some of the policy behind the rule to justify your answer, this might only be what separates the top answers from some of the still pretty good answers. It just seems kind of silly to me, that’s all. But maybe the justification is that law school is, again, trying to teach you how to think, how to approach issues using independent thought and analysis, and so on.

And I swear on mother’s future grave, I think some of the 1Ls are enjoying this shit. There are 1Ls always hanging around campus who I have yet to see studying. I think they are just so into the law school experience that they feel compelled to discuss and analyze every moment of the exam period. They will walk up to you as you enter the door and tell you how they studied all last night and eating microwave popcorn for dinner. It’s irritating and disgusting. If this wasn’t a competition, I might explain to them that if they didn’t spend their days telling people about their late night studying, they probably wouldn’t have to study all night.

Terrifyingly enough, I’m hearing (primarily from the idiot gossips mentioned above) rumors of sloppy, stress-induced lawcest. Every day, I hear something new and ridiculous – like a guy a cheating on his wife with a positively hideous member of his study group after they spent six hours reviewing the incredibly easy torts material. YES I’M TALKING ABOUT YOU SHAWN (SEAN?). Sadly, I’ve been unable to capitalize on this phenomenon. Perhaps it’s because I’ve continued to be a 9.5 on the sad Harvard 1-10 scale? Maybe I’ll stop showering or something.

The upperclassmen, being better than our class in practically every way, do not seem fazed at all by the exam period. They are all of normal demeanor and attire. I guess the change happens over the summer…

So anyways, law school exams are extremely easy. I adjusted my sleeping schedule so that I wake up between 9 and 10 PM. If I have an exam (take home or traditional) the next day, I spend the next ten or so hours memorizing my outline. For one exam, the subject of which I can’t name because it would probably identify my section, these ten hours represented the entirety of my studying effort. I wrote for three straight hours, basically regurgitating the outline, applying the information to the various issues as they revealed themselves.

As I have no way to grasp how well I actually did, it seems foolish to brag about my performance, BUT I DOMINATED THAT SHIT. I’m pretty sure that I’m going to be near the top of my class by the end of this semester. Vault 5, how YOU doin’?

I…I’m not really sure how I feel about what transpired today. I’m not really sure whether I want to crawl into bed and pass out, or go to the bar and down a few shots, or sit in the corner and cry, or study for civil procedure, or go for a run, or eat something.

At 5:43PM exactly I turned in my torts exam.

I started the day in a fighting mood. I woke up at 7:30AM and went for a run. I felt good. I felt pumped. I felt ready! I showered and dressed and walked briskly up to school. I felt winter for the first time today as it was 22 degrees when I left my apartment.

Everyone was all smiles in the exam room as we lined up to receive our tests. We smiled and warmly wished each other good luck. My exam was time stamped at 9:48AM. I shoved it into my bag, left school, swung by Dunkin’ Donuts for a bagel and hot chocolate, and returned to my apartment ready and raring.

It was an eight-hour affair so I immediately set up camp at my desk. I had my outline in hard copy as well as pulled up on my computer screen (God bless CTRL + F). My textbook was open to the chapter on vicarious liability and set up on the floor near my feet. With hot chocolate and a glass of grapefruit juice at the ready, I was all set.

AND SO BEGAN THE SHORTEST EIGHT HOURS OF MY LIFE!

I got up once to pee and didn’t consume another morsel of food the entire day. I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. And then I was over the word limit for the first question by about 1,000 words. So I cut and cut and cut and cut. (Never have I ever submitted an academic work with so many contractions before.) Two of the questions were these insanely long and convoluted fact patterns full of these ridiculous actions and chain reactions that would NEVER HAPPEN IN REAL LIFE and every time I turned the page I would think, “Seriously?? It’s still going on??”

The other two questions were these policy questions that weren’t weighted as heavily as the two issue-spotters so I slacked accordingly. Hours flew by and there were STILL MORE ISSUES to pull out of the big questions! But only 1,000 words could be used to discuss them! Every time I looked at the clock another hour had whooshed by and I was coming up on the end. Eventually I had to throw in the towel. I wasn’t going to get to all the issues.

At 5:20 I threw on some jeans and half-walked, half-ran back up to school. The computer room was abuzz with the chatter of my classmates as we printed exams, cursed at printers, and broke staplers. I printed my test and waited in line to turn it in. I made it in with five minutes to spare.

I intended to head straight home, but got waylaid by a few classmates in the hall and we debriefed. We avoided discussing any content of the exam but vented our frustrations at the word limit, the time limit, law school, life in general.

And ugh. I just feel so unsatisfied. Like I could’ve written a really great exam if only I had more time or more words. I’ve never turned in a test or a paper KNOWING I was leaving something out. I may have had some vague feeling that something wasn’t quite right, or I may have known I was completely bullshitting an answer. And I’m sure that there are definitely issues that I didn’t notice at all…but I’ve never had a situation where I had right answers in my head and just couldn’t get them down on the paper because of stupid limitations like time.

Does anybody get all the issues???

I still haven’t eaten anything today. My grapefruit juice is half drunk. I’m still not sure what to do with myself.

But on the bright side! I’m 1/3 of the way done with my exams. In a week and a half I’ll be home free!

Good luck to everyone!