OL Crazy and Mandatory Volunteerism

It's only 1.5 days until the star of my law school career and I am putting everything in order so that I can be ready to study with minimal drama and distraction. Almost everything is in place, except for minor, completely unimportant things like my health insurance. I've realized through this preparation that I am maybe a tiny bit obsessive (but not always compulsive).

I have bought some new clothes in all neutral colors so that they can all go together and so that I do not display any unseemly personality, god forbid. Orientation starts with a cookout, which I am dreading. I am dreading trying to make friends in a big group of people I don't know. I am horrified at the thought of actually SPEAKING to professors outside of class! And I am terrified of having to attempt to eat and talk at the same time. How does anyone manage this without looking like a gaping idiot, or dribble food down your front, or ending up with green stuff in your teeth? This is all starting to sound a little crazy.

I read a horror story somewhere (I can't remember where) about a 1L student dropping a whole PLATE full of food on a professor's clothes. I do not have the greatest track record of being impressive and poised in front of people I actually want to impress, so I am actually kind of worried about this. I think the only solution is to not eat at this thing. I'll be too nervous and I am actually just scared to look stupid and embarrass myself on the first day of law school. Call me whatever names you wish. I may turn out to be this person.

I'm also being pretty obsessive about my work space. I'm trying to keep as many potentially distracting items off my desk as possible. Smart, right? My desk (from IKEA, but I love it) is about 2000 square feet of empty real estate and it's kind of cold most of the time. When I start working, though, I have a system and my desk ends up being completely cluttered by all the things I need to have within a hand's reach while I'm studying. And everything needs to be in its proper place. My pencil case must be open and placed on the top right corner of the desk. I need three items--a pen, a highlighter and pad of post-it notes--to my immediate right. My subject binder must be open to the syllabus and placed in the top left hand corner of the desk. My planner must be opened and place just below the binder. My computer, if I am using it must be directly in front of me and slightly more than halfway up the desk. The desk lamp(s) must be placed at a 45 degree angle, pointing directly at my work. Obviously this means my things are sprawled all over the place, which makes my husband nervous because he only has one desk at his place. I imagine he wants to be the one to use it.

I've also been a little obsessive about my study statistics ever since I started reading for my intro class at the beginning of the week. I set myself a number of pages per day and I've been keeping track of how much time it takes me to read them, including how much time I spend faffing. Faffing is a fantastic British word for procrastinating and otherwise wasting time. I have a little three-channel timer and I kept track of things down to the minute. The first day I was reading, I read at the rate of 11 minutes per page--awful! I think that was mostly attributable to excessive amounts of faff. About 30% of my time spent 'working' was actually just faffing. Not good. However, by Friday I took only 3 minutes per page, and spent only 10% of my time faffing, so I'd say that's some good improvement. Did I understand much of what I was reading? Well, I certainly didn't learn it. I think that will require a second reading and some note taking. I have no idea how I'm supposed to do this in the number of hours available in the day!

Finally, one last piece of law school crazy. The 1Ls are going to spend one afternoon of the orientation doing a community volunteering project. I got a list of all the possible assignments, which included volunteering at the public library, etc, generally indoor things. Me? I'm going to be doing trail maintenance at a local park. I generally don't do outdoors in the summer, but come orientation, I will be hot and sweaty, maintaining some trails with 40 other 1Ls and the Dean of Admissions. Voluntarily.

Further Prepping for Law School

I have been engaged in further preparing my world for the onslaught that is one L.

I have received notification of my loans. This is the first time I have had to take out loans and it is a scary process.

I am also fully engaged in covering my readings for my Intro to Law class. I have no problem reading the material, I can do that in a couple of hours a day. The problem is taking notes on it such that I have actually learned the material. It's just too huge a volume of information to get by just highlighting. I've started using OneNote, which I am loving, but note-taking in outline form is exhausting. My system is that I read the material once, highlighting important parts (which, for a lot of the reading, is every single word in ever single sentence of many sections). Then I go back and take detailed notes in outline form. It is taking forever--I have to find a better system--any suggestions out there?

Speaking of OneNote, if you haven't tried it you should. I think it is a fantastic way to organize all your notes in one place where they are easy to navigate but, more importantly, also much easier to amend, revise, edit, and expand. If you are going to use OneNote or another computer program to keep all your notes though, for god's sake, please back everything up. I am going to sign up for an online automatic backing up service that backs your harddrive up remotely over the internet on a continuous basis.

The material I am reading is really interesting. Of course, it is only the basics of law, but I am finding it so fascinating. This is helped by the fact that law is a subject that revolves around human behavior and human conduct. The hypothetical and real-life cases make it easy to connect with the material. I really love engaging mentally with the legal issues in the judgments as well, thinking along, 'Oh I agree with that' or 'That's not right!' or 'I disagree!' or, as when I read a judgment by Justice Scalia, 'Oooh, this is so persuasive... but.. must... resist agreeing!'. Also, I know it's totally juvenile, but I was reading a judgment where a woman sued a defendant over negligent acts that resulted in her husband becoming sexually impotent and it was called Cox v Haworth. Tee hee. Forgive me.

I also had the opportunity to meet two of my potential future law professors because they are friends with my in-laws and we all had dinner over at another family's house. I've realized that knowing law professors personally or semi-personally is a double-edge sword. On one hand, they're much easier to approach if you need advice or help with something. On the other hand, they are your professional contacts and you have to keep that in mind even in a personal social setting. I had been complaining to my mother-in-law about how I have a test in the first week of law school, only joking about it. But she must have mentioned it to one of the law professors, who then gave me the whole justification for why it had to be done, why we have to start school so early; she also told me in a somewhat exasperated tone (because she has probably had to deal with a lot of 1Ls panicking over this ONE credit hour, PASS/FAIL class) that the casebook is easy to read, that the exam isn't a big deal and that I should not worry so much about it.

Well, reader, I had not been worrying about it so much. I think my little joke just got misconstrued as it passed through the grapevine, and now I fear one of my future law professors thinks I've already started complaining about the workload of law school. Not the first impression I wanted to give to this lady. Am I being paranoid?

I have also requested a section transfer so I can be in the other prof's class. Is that inappropriate? Is that tacky? Is that allowed? I don't know. I just know that I will find him approachable if and when I need help in class. Plus, it puts me in the class of another law professor whom I have not met, but who sounds like a one of those law whiz kids. He's relatively young and he did several degrees at Cambridge, so we can laugh hysterically about the British and really bond and basically become best friends. I also wanted to switch sections because it would give me a more compacted schedule with no awkward 1-2hr waits between classes. More compact schedule = more study time = more time for the FABULOUS new gym on campus. I've already got my deluxe, clubhouse locker.

Oh my but this year is going to be amazing. If you're thinking these are famous last words, don't disillusion me yet.

Things are picking up around here, although orientation is still two and a half weeks away. I am helping The Economist move to Cowville at the end of this week, then I may spend some time in Cowville while he is in a pre-orientation math camp (hello--so elementary school). I will spend the time decorating and fitting out his new apartment and hopefully doing some studying of my own. At some point I will then come back down and start preparing for my orientation and for classes to start. Once orientation starts, all my down time will be devoted to full on study for the first week of classes, then on and on and on. Soon it will be final exams, then Christmas, then back into it.

I have picked up some materials for the first class we have to take, Intro to Law. I'm ridiculously excited to start. But I'm holding off though and just reading 1L prep books from my summer reading list (in between running errands--I've gone to Target a million times since I've been back in town). The one I'm reading now, '1L of a Ride' by Andrew J. McClurg, is quite easy reading, written in a colloquial language and giving good advice.

I also got a law school locker today, along with my locker combination (hello--so high school).

I have a little advantage in that I'm living in town, am here before most of the other students, already have my ID card, etc. so I can do things before other people can. I love how well I already know this town and the university.

I also had to submit my loan papers--I'm definitely taking out loans all three years. Tuition went up $6000 from two years ago! Thank goodness I'm an in-stater.

What's Next

As my favorite TV president, Jed Bartlett, would say, ‘What’s next?’

I got a big packet today of law things including my first semester schedule, and my reading syllubus for orientation. We’re taking a short introduction to law class during orientation week and then... we have to take an exam at the end of it! What the hell is this? It’s August and I’m already taking a law exam???!!! Now that I know I’m actually still going to law school, all this stuff is starting to make me nervous. Still, I was looking at that syllabus, which including such topic headings as stare decisis and retroactivity, and I was getting really excited. That’s a good sign, isn’t it?

Now I’ve got a series of posts to write and publish which will be coming soon, and which I will hopefully finish before the real work of law school starts.

I’m so fricking happy I’m still a law student.

My Living Nightmare

I have been living out a nightmare for the last few days. Has anyone had a nightmare that you were accepted to law school, but you are then told by the dean that, because you forgot to do some fiddly little insignificant thing, your admission has been revoked and you’re not going to law school?

I guess things have just been going too freaking well for me then, because THIS IS WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO ME!!!

I came home from several weeks of traveling to find a letter from the University of Pomorum saying they never received my deposit payment of $250 and assumed that I had made other plans and consequently my admission had been cancelled.

It was after office hours, so I sent an email to the admissions office. I spent the rest of the night in a tearing blind panic, waiting for the admissions office to open the next morning so I could call and explain what happened and try to work it out so that I could be readmitted.

What happened was that I definitely went onto the online system and paid the deposit. In fact I paid the whole deposit of $400 at once rather than waiting to pay incrementally. The Economist was there the whole time I made the payment and recalled my doing it as well because he fed me our bank account numbers. I did it through our online school forum (most schools have something similar). But for some reason, the payment did not go through and I never noticed that the money did not leave my bank account. (This is because only my husband has online access to our banking—which is completely foolish because you should never leave only one person in charge of two peoples’ finances.) Around the same time I also submitted a transcript request. This request too apparently did not ever go through. I never received any confirmation that the payment had gone through, nor did I receive any indication that the payment had failed. I kept receiving things from the Pomorum Law School (PLS) including that request for transcripts. I sent one from undergrad off of the online forum, the one that never went through, and one from my London Master’s University, via paper request. I had no idea whatsoever why the payment had not gone through.

I called the minute the office was open the next morning and explained what happened. The lady seemed to think there was nothing to be done about it! She was so desperately unhelpful and unsympathetic; she did not seem to understand that this was KIND OF IMPORTANT to me.

Finally she said what I could do was write a letter explaining what happened and see if the admissions committee would change their mind. After I got off the phone with her, I called all the IT people at the U of P, billing and admissions, and could produce no evidence that I had attempted to make that payment in the first place. I started working on my letter to the admissions committee and waiting for The Economist to come home from a doctor’s appointment he had that morning. When he got back, I had to explain the situation to him out loud. I think this was probably the lowest moment I have experienced in a long time and I just lost it for a while. Then I pulled myself together, wrote the damn letter and emailed it in. I also consulted the U of P law professor with whom I had spoken some time before. He was very encouraging, saying that he would be very surprised indeed if the committee allowed this sort of mistake to be the basis for rejecting an admitted student. But, he said, he really had no idea how this process worked. He said I should write the letter and hand deliver it to both the admin lady and the Dean of Admissions, along with a check for the full amount of the deposit.

I wrote, frankly, a stellar letter outlining what happened. I emphasized that I thought I had done the necessary action and although I could not explain why the payment had not gone through, in every other respect, I had been planning and intending to attend the PLS in the fall, including moving back to the United States, passing up other opportunities in the UK, submitting transcripts as requested even after the payment was due, and otherwise completely rearranging me and my husband’s lives in order to go to this school. I felt I laid everything out there, made a strong argument and could add nothing else. All I could do was hope the committee believed me.

The Economist and I delivered the letter by hand, almost getting into an accident on the way, we were both so distracted. When I got to the office, I had already put the check into the envelope I was delivering to the Dean of Admissions. I had hoped to be able to talk to him about it—‘bring it to his attention’ as they say—unfortunately he was not in and would not be back until next Monday. So I spoke to the admin lady, who seemed almost angry that I had chosen to hand deliver the letters, and to give a copy to the Dean of Admissions. She did not want me to give him the check either, so I had to take it out of the envelope. I was really worried about not including the check so I tried to sneak it back in, but she caught me. Oh well, I tried. Anyway, I left it in her hands and walked out feeling like the biggest idiot in the world. The problem was that I felt I had not done anything wrong but I couldn’t prove it. I also felt stupid about the fact that, if I was not readmitted, I would just reapply next year, they’d probably accept me, and I’d start the following fall, having wasted another year doing nothing, all because of a stupid mistake I didn’t really make.

After that, The Economist and I didn’t really know what to do with ourselves. We had meant to spend part of the day in our favorite coffee shop, reading and working on things. But we weren’t settled enough in our minds to do that. There were all kinds of things we needed to do to prepare for law school and grad school, but I didn’t want to do any of it until we knew one way or the other what was going to happen. I’m not the kind of person who can just go on faith that the right outcome will just happen.

We went to my future grocery store to look around and see if the things we’ve gotten used to eating in Britain were available in the US. Then we went to The Economist’s grandma’s house to drop off some Baileys Truffles we bought in Ireland for her husband who is undergoing chemotherapy and radiation therapy for the second time. That put things sharply in perspective. TE and I are young, healthy and we have each other through thick and thin. I knew then that I could handle the worst case scenario of having the wait until next year. It would be awful, but there are worse things in this world and talking to TE’s saint-like grandma made me realize that.

We were supposed to leave the next day to visit my brother-in-law, a 5-hour drive away, and we briefly considered not going in case the PLS needed me for anything but we decided since the Dean of Admissions was gone until Monday, we couldn’t expect to hear anything (and the admin lady said next week was the earliest we could expect to hear anything) so we decided to go anyway and try to enjoy ourselves.

It was unbelievably painful to have to explain the situation to everyone we encountered who asked about my plans or when I started at school. I felt anxious all the time. I tried to think about it as little as possible.

On the drive down, we were relayed a message via TE’s family that the admin lady had called, but again it was out of office hours, so I had to wait over an agonizingly anxious night to call.

In the morning I did call. She told me that the IT people had confirmed that I had signed onto the forum system on the date I said I did and that I was being readmitted.

...

...

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After the last four years, and especially the last one year, I did not need this one more roller coaster ride. I was not even as relieved to be readmitted as I thought I should be because I always felt I had done nothing wrong in the first place. And it completely killed any thrill I had felt about being back home because of the pulse-quickening anxiety I felt every time I thought about it.

If I believed in an intelligent omniscient and omnipotent creator, I’d say that creator wanted to make me to really, really, REALLY appreciate my acceptance to law school.

I know there are more lessons here but I need some time to process this.

Also, I know for sure that I've been admitted because I now have a $12,000 university bill.

What I'm Doing to Prepare for Law School

Now that I’m a 0L, I’ve been getting full swing into the 0L thing. What am I doing to prepare for 1L?

I have been advised over and over and over again that the summer before 1L should not be spent trying to learn law because

a.) You won’t understand anything anyway and

b.) The first year of law school is a very brief and intense period before which you should rest, relax and gird yourself for the forthcoming work.

The advice from a British book called Letters to a Law Student by Nicholas J. McBridge is that if you get your books and can study the first few chapters of each, you’ll be a little bit ahead when school starts.

A friend of mine who just graduated from the University of Pomorum Law School this past year has also advised me that I should just try to enjoy myself. He said that once school starts, things will not be bad, just different.

I told him I was only worried about wearing myself out enjoying myself this summer. For one I’m going on a million vacations. I just came back from Scotland. In a few days, I’m going to go to Ireland. Then I’m going to Boston for a family reunion. After that I’m going to visit my brother-in-law where he and his fiancé live. I won’t say where, but I will say it will include a beer brewery tour and a fancy new modern art museum.

After that I’m helping The Economist move to Cowville, then returning to Pomorum City for the briefest of moments before the school year actually starts!

McBride has a few more pieces of advice. First, he suggests that although you shouldn’t read law, you should read a lot to get used to the volume of material. Second, he suggests you should read things you won’t have time to read in school, particularly about different subjects to law. He also suggests that you read a study skills book well before school starts. Third, he thinks you should cultivate an interest in politics and economics. Scott Turow also has an interesting take on this issue, which I will write about later.

Following that advice, here is my reading list for sliz-ummer 2010:

One L—Scott Turow DONE

Never Let Me Go—Kazao Ishiguro DONE

King Leopold’s Ghost—Adam Hochschild ALMOST done

Infidel—Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Gilead—Marilynne Robinson

Moby Dick—Herman Melville

The Rule of Law—Tom Bingham

1000 Days to the Bar—Tonsing

1L of a Ride—McClurg

Succeeding in Law School—Ramy

I might also add a straight study skills book to the mix because I seem never to have developed those myself.

I’ve also been reading from the blogs, such as this post by Dennis Jansen, about what law students should be wearing to orientation and beyond. I’ve realized that my wardrobe is not suited to a semi-professional environment and that I will have to remedy this once I get back to Pomorum City. I do not want to veer too far into a non-law related subject, but I do think that the way you dress is important to the way you are viewed as a professional. It sucks, but there it is.

I feel the following is a delicate issue.

I have always had difficulty finding clothes that fit well and this is especially problematic when it comes to professional dress. You don’t want to look sloppy, or unkempt, or vulgar. The way I see it is that, far from being fashionable, you should try to look so effortlessly well-maintained and well-groomed that your clothes become a non-issue. There should be nothing positive or negative that stands out about your clothes, so that your work and your manner come through as the strongest impression left upon people. Office politics being what they are I know it is impossible to completely escape scrutiny of one’s clothing, especially if one happens to be a woman who works with other women. I want to stick, so far as it is possible, to my ‘ethic’ or philosophy of workplace clothing.

Consequently I’ve realized that I have to lose some weight. I am about to say something controversial, without apology; it’s just what I think at the moment:

You can be a fat man and still be viewed as a professional. It is harder for a fat woman to be viewed as professional.

Women’s clothing always affects the way they are perceived professionally more than men’s. I will see in time if this opinion in correct.

Anyway, I have to get into shape. Since appearances are so important, I’m just going to take this as part of my ongoing professional development. It wouldn’t hurt to be a bit healthier too.

I also got some pre-orientation reading in the mail from Pomorum. I had to fill out the FAFSA for the first time as an independent. It turns out I am eligible for the low-interest student loans, but I think for the first year, I will be able to pay from my savings. And since I will not be paying rent, my living expenses are going to be quite small. I want to delay taking out loans for as long as possible. Luckily, The Economist has full funding and a stipend at Cow College, so we will keep our debt load relatively low. Still, we will end up at least $100,000 in debt between us. This is an amount of money I cannot possibly conceptualize right now, so I won’t try. I think, like most people my age, I’ll just think about it later. What else can we do?

I’m off to continue ‘preparing for law school’ by enjoying the crap out of myself.