Something of a postscript to first semester…

Over the break, there was little responsibility to deal with, it was mostly just a time to kick back and relax. However, I knew that it would be in my best interest to get started on my job hunt. I decided that I wanted to pursue work for the summer in Indiana, so I phoned and sent my resume and cover letter to every judge within a reasonable daily commute of Bloomington. I decided that since I’m still something of a generalist and am unsure exactly what type of law that I want to practice, I preferred the idea of working for a judge to the idea of working for a firm so that I could possibly be exposed to more areas of the law; I realized that there was very little chance of landing a paying 1L summer job, especially in this economy, so I decided I should get my name out there early for any position I could find before jobs started to get picked over.

Thankfully, the whole process was far less difficult and painful than I was expecting. A county circuit court judge sent me an e-mail that sounded like he was basically willing to hire me sight unseen, assuming that I was okay with not being paid. I talked to him over the phone soon after, and he did end up offering me the spot without even having met me in person yet. He said I could set my own schedule, do research work from home if I wanted to, and that he would give me plenty of input into what area of law I’d want to work on for my cases. Also, and this was vital, he said that the work should provide me with a good writing sample that I can use in future interviews. I was quite surprised to get all of this done from Washington, but I managed it and it’s nice to have my summer work lined up before the semester even starts…it will happily provide me with one less thing to worry about.

The new semester starts Thursday. I’m sure that before long I’ll become too busy to blog regularly again, but I have every intention to complete a journal of this coming semester as well when all is said and done. This is one of the most important years of my life, and I’ll be happy to have a detailed account of it later.

My First Full Semester of Law School (Part Seventeen)

Finals Week #2 (December 13^th-19^th, 2009) – Part Two

Unlike the previous exams, I knew in this case that I couldn’t take the rest of the day off. I grabbed lunch with my study partners, then had to hit crim pro hard. I kept on telling myself that I would work ahead to crim pro during my other studies, but it simply didn’t happen (I spent maybe a couple of hours on it two weeks before, but that was all). Procrastination is very much part of my nature…my undergrad GPA more than reflects that. I’ve fought it off reasonably well during law school so far, but it still seeps in sometimes.

Basically, at this point, I had no outline whatsoever for crim pro. Outlining for a class that doesn’t allow you to bring the outline into the exam only has utility in that it’s a really good learning tool to write down concepts to commit them back to your memory from when you first heard them in class and put them in your notes, but I still felt that I was woefully behind. I had barely read for this class, and was starting on my outline about 48 hours before the exam. Sounds like a recipe for disaster, right?

My First Full Semester of Law School (Part Sixteen)

Finals Week #2 (December 13^th-19^th, 2009) – Part One

I had to put my disappointment in the civ pro exam behind me so that I could perform optimally on my last two exams, crim law and crim pro from Hoffmann.

As I put it in an e-mail later in the evening on the day that I took the exam,

“Hope the test went well for you Lauren. I’m putting mine behind me; I have to be like Peyton Manning and shrug an interception off like a man, not like Jay Cutler and go to the sideline to cry like a little baby about it. Okay, so I was whining through much of lunch with Justin and Ryan about it, but I’m done with that now. Until I see my grade, at least. Besides, I do think contracts went well.”

My First Full Semester of Law School (Part Fifteen)

Finals Week #1 (December 6^th-12^th, 2009) – Part Two

I woke up the next day worse than expected. No, I wasn’t hung over…that would have been preferable, honestly. I woke up with a back injury, or more accurately a pinched sciatic nerve. I’ve had this before, it’s extremely painful and doesn’t go away for weeks. It makes it difficult to ever get in a comfortable position. This is not exactly what I wanted to run into as I knew immediately that I would have to sit for my last three finals with it. Ugh.

In any case, as we had begun to do every day in preparation for our finals, I had my study friends over and we got back to work. Honestly, I had gotten pretty irritable by this point. My friends did absolutely nothing wrong, but when you spend that many hours with someone doing an activity like studying that isn’t fun, you’re going to get edgy. When you do all of the above while dealing with sciatic nerve pain, you’re going to get really edgy. I bottled all of my frustrations with them since I knew very well that they were doing nothing wrong, but I was annoyed since I had begun hosting the study sessions instead of doing them at the library and that made it way harder to end the sessions without being rude. I couldn’t sit comfortably, I felt that my outline was behind theirs, I attempted to talk with them while laying on the floor of my living room…it just wasn’t ideal.

My First Full Semester of Law School (Part Fourteen)

Finals Week #1 (December 6^th-12^th, 2009) – Part One

Two days before finals, I e-mail my friend Lauren looking for reassurance:

“Please reassure me that there’s a bunch of stupid people milling around silently under the radar who are going to pad the curve below me even though I don’t actually know anything about contracts, civ pro, criminal law or criminal procedure.”

Seriously, I figured that a lot of people that I haven’t met and don’t see around very much might be getting overwhelmed around this time. Not exactly the nicest thing for me to hope for, but I needed some kind of insurance against landing in the bottom half of the curve. In competition, part of succeeding is hoping that your opponent slips up.