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.

All of that griping aside, we were still productive and I still felt prepared for the civ pro final by the time we broke on Thursday evening. Another friend came by and we hung out and ignored the coming civ pro exam, and just chatted about anything else…like with shooting hoops with one of my friends a couple of days before, I totally stand by the need to take some time to just rest and unwind if possible before a final, provided that you’re ready…and I felt ready.

I did have a hard time getting to sleep that night and probably got no more than 4.5 hours of sleep, but I loaded up on Red Bull and honestly felt alert for the duration of the test. The format of this one was 90 minutes of multiple choice and 90 minutes of essay (this came with a word limit of 2000 words, so racing to type as many words as possible simply wasn’t going to happen in this case).

The multiple choice section went okay…I definitely got stumped a few times, but I didn’t feel that the section went badly. The exam instructions told us that if we got done with that section early (I got done with nearly a half hour to spare), we couldn’t start typing the essay but we could look ahead and start formulating an outline for our answer. As I turned the page and looked at the essay question…I was stumped. I mean, I spotted some things to write about, but in general my heart dropped; I really didn’t know what I was going to write. I got up and went to the bathroom since I couldn’t type yet anyway, and tried to gather my thoughts during this time. I didn’t come up with much, honestly.

I came back and made an effort at it, and we’ll see what happens when the grade comes back, but this exam did not feel good. Thankfully a ton of people seemed to gripe about how hard this test was and how badly they did also, so a soft curve might come to my rescue. My school grades to a B+ median, and looking at Professor Geyh’s past grade distributions, he rarely gives A’s out, which leaves lots of room in the curve for even more A-‘s and B+’s than other profs give out. I would call my chances at an A- to be almost non-existent, but I could get lucky and get a B+ here. Since his grade distributions don’t seem to ever go lower than B-, that’s my floor, but I do have a feeling that I did well enough to stay off of the very bottom. I’ll get a B or a B+ on this test, any other result is going to very much surprise me.

This was a morning final on a Friday, and once again I just couldn’t bring myself to crack back into the books for the rest of the day. These exams are a really draining experience. I should have battled through and at least gotten back into it at night, but I simply didn’t. I began hitting crim law hard on Saturday though, as the Tuesday final for that exam was next on the docket.