Orientation Week--Humiliation , Experimentation and Vindication!

What a week this has been.

My school has students take a class during orientation week, an introduction to law and legal reasoning. It sort of operates as a mini-class, giving you an idea of what a full-length class is like. We have reading to prepare, we are examined under the Socratic method in class, we learn some substantive and some procedural law (as well as a bit of legal history and a bit about American and British legal structures) and we take an abbreviated exam at the end of it, part multiple choice, part legal essay/short answer.

I am so glad they have us do this. It has given me some time to sort out exactly how I want to learn this year—because it is not like anything I have done previously. We’re students and, of course, we read and study written material. But from here on out, our reading is pretty much going to be confined to case law. There will not be a lot of exposition and we will have to derive principles of law from the cases themselves—they will not be laid out for us. This class has been essential in giving us a conception of what that’s like. It has also been crucial for sorting out the mechanics of how I’m going to work. I mentioned earlier how I’ve been using OneNote. At first I was loving it and I loved that you could make lecture recordings right alongside your note-taking. Now that I’ve finished this little class, I’ve decided I probably won’t use OneNote anymore. (There are certain inconveniences about it that mean it would be easier to just use Word. And... like anyone is going to want to listen to their lectures one more time, right?) But at least I’ve decided definitely to use the computer for note taking. I also think I have a strategy for how to prepare for exams, which is the most important thing. Everything depends on exams in law school, so you’ve got to get your strategies down. I’m glad I had this small class to experiment with before the real classes start.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

We did our volunteering one afternoon early in the week; it had rained all morning. A group of 40 of us got bussed out to a nature trail where there were some park rangers waiting for us in the parking lot. They told us that they had cut down a bunch of baby trees from the forest—because they take nutrients and light from other trees?—they had all been piled up about a quarter mile down the trail. We were to bring them up to the wood chipper parked in the parking lot. Pretty simple. So we just did trip after trip after trip. Of course what happens when 40 people march up and down in a moderate rain on a woodland path—oh—by the way—dragging trees behind them? It turns into a mudslide and everything gets filthy, including the people moving the trees. Despite which it was actually kind of fun. My mood was significantly elevated by a particular circumstance, which I will relate now!

The dean of admissions was in our group (also getting filthy, he’s a nice guy) and, seeing my name tag, he told me that he was sorry if I had suffered some distress over the confusion with the deposit because, in fact, the IT people had looked into and it turned out that I had NOT made a mistake! The online program logs people off after 30 minutes without their knowing it. They have since fixed this problem. And there was actually one other person whom this defect effected. He said that if it had been just one person who reported this problem they might not have believed the story and they might not have looked into it. So I must thank that poor other person who went through the terrible time I went through. I wouldn’t normally wish it on anyone else but thank goodness it happened to just one other person!

Oh sweet, sweet, delicious VINDICATION!

I hope that takes me off the shit list, but I don’t think it does because all the admin people seem to know my name, and not in a good way.

Moving right along...

My class has been really interesting. I made some serious studying mistakes, which I will not make again, thanks to this class. (More on that later.) I have been really enjoying the material and the work—the mental processes are... I hesitate to say it because it’s so nerdy... but it’s fun. After taking this exam, I was embarrassingly thinking, I wish I could write more! I may not think that if it turns out I did really poorly. I don’t know what it is. I’ve always enjoyed studying law.

In class, I felt I should sit tight for the first few days and not try to volunteer, lest I make a fool of myself early on and develop a reputation as a dolt. But on the second day, I did volunteer. HINT: If you don’t want to get called on, just volunteer when you have something worth saying. I thought I had this whole case figured out and I was thinking no one else was getting it but me, and I’d just sort them out by stating the obvious. So I volunteered. And I was promptly shut down. My cheeks burned for a moment, but then I decided others had said dumber things and that we would all say some dumb things this year. And if anyone was thinking I was stupid, well they were stupid! Let’s just give everyone a break, shall we?

Anyway, the next day I said something really smart that no one else knew and felt totally awesome, until I got over confident, volunteered again and said something sort of moderately stupid. I do not think I am one to go on the law school emotional roller coaster, so I’m letting these roll off my back and will just do the very best I can and hope everyone else does the same

There are those who are making nuisances of themselves in class... yes—the gunners have announced themselves. Now, how do you know if you’re a gunner? It seems that gunners don’t really seem to know they are gunners, so here is a little checklist:

1.) If you are quoting Kant and no one asked you to, you’re a gunner.
2.) If you are asking questions about substantive due process, and we’re working on ‘what is a statute?’, you’re a gunner.
3.) If you think you’re at the head of the class because you were a philosophy major and did pretty well on the LSAT, and you want everyone to know it, you’re a gunner, and you’re an idiot.

We had an orientation session with upperclassmen with no professors or administrators around, for the really candid questions. The best piece of advice was, ‘Just calm the fuck down.’ So much of law school stress is self-induced and really, you must just calm the fuck down. This was also the primary message I got from Scott Turow’s book, One L. I meant to post a proper review of One L but, heck, I don’t have time to do that anymore. So I’ll just say that One L was really interesting. He talks a lot about the stress and the oppressive workload, but he never explains how he got through it. It would have been useful to learn how one person managed to handle the law school workload, especially at Harvard Law School. So don’t go to One L looking for study tips. Do look at 1L of a Ride by McClurg (can’t remember the first name). It’s full of useful information, and I think it even helped me during the introductory class and certainly on the exam. So many people at the law school don’t seem to have a clue what is going on. Do some research before you go to school, because you don’t always have to learn as you go, especially when that has such high-stakes consequences.

Other random tips I learned this week:

--Read footnotes—they’re interesting and sometimes hold key information.
--Brief every case, but brief it keeping in mind what you’re looking for—know what you’re supposed to be getting out of it by contextualizing it. I went to bed the night before the exam feeling okay about how I reviewed. Then, at some point in the night, I realized that I had been studying all the wrong things. I had been studying the substantive law, when actually this course was about and I should have been studying the legal reasoning and basic legal principles in the judgments. I woke up early in the morning (as I had been doing all week actually) and made a quick cheat sheet (open book exam) of some basic legal principles and the development of some legal reasoning in lines of litigation. And this cheat sheet was absolutely crucial for me in the exam. Of course, I could not rely heavily on it, it was just to have the exact language laid out and in one place. But it was crucial.
--DON’T just highlight in your book without going back immediately and extracting the main points in a note format. I read and highlighted everything for my introductory class the week before and it was a complete waste of time because I did not retain any of it and I had to go back and take actual computerized notes on it anyway. It was annoying. Particularly with cases, because they’re so dense, highlighting just will not do. You have to extract the facts and rules and, very important, put them in your own words as much as possible.

I think it’s going to be a difficult but rewarding three years.

Resurgam

I am sitting in the Shaw Library at the London School of Economics. It’s one of those old-fashioned grand libraries: a wood paneled room, topped with a glass dome, its walls lined with portraits of former university presidents. Various bookshelves are ranged against the walls, heaving with dusty books, their spines yellowed and tilting behind milky glass. Red upholstered armchairs are clustered around the room. The library is only sparsely populated, most students having finished their exams and decamped, setting up in pubs to relax, drink and watch World Cup. The ones that remain in the library study or write feverishly; some are on Facebook; some are asleep.

I have not experienced the hush rustling quiet of a student library since I finished my master’s degree. I have spent the last two years planning on re-entering academia this fall to begin a law degree. I could just as well have said, ‘to begin my life’. The last four years, since I moved to England, have felt like a long and fruitless detour to the one thing I have wanted to do since I was a junior in college: go to law school and become a lawyer. I bear the most blame for this. The first year, while my husband was in graduate school, I spent temping. It was a job of mindless number crunching and paper pushing. The second year I did my master’s degree. I thought it would help me get into law school. The third I spent doing an internship that, in practical terms, finished four months before I left it. I thought it also would help me get into law school. The eight months since the end of my internship have constituted a long and punishing period of unsuccessful job hunting. I put this down to the recession and consequentially the scarcity of job openings in my field, combined with my lack of substantial work experience. I am classically over-educated and under-experienced. I have been very frustrated and discouraged by this situation but I have taken comfort in the thought that I would enter law school in the fall after which I would have gained some qualities of employability. I was very sanguine about it... until the rejections began pouring in.

In the meantime, my husband was accepted to a PhD program with full funding, a teaching position and a stipend. We planned to move back to the US, something I was so very excited about, until I realized that I was not returning to do anything. I only faced more of the same situation as London: endless fruitless job hunting—only this time it would be more difficult because we would be moving to a much smaller city with fewer job opportunities in my field. A few weeks ago I began submitting applications to various jobs in New York and Washington D.C., where I thought I might have more success. It would require my husband and I to live a substantial distance apart from each other—at least 2 hours by plane—but my husband understands that I can’t spend another year doing nothing of value for my career. Law school? It seems impossible. I have an offer from University College London but feel I don’t want to live in London anymore, much less with my husband halfway across the world. I have been rejected or waitlisted at every US school to which I applied. I have never felt so hopeless and so helpless about my future. I have contemplated giving up on law altogether. I have tried to accept (once again) reduced expectations for my future. I have even contemplated getting pregnant and resigning myself to a life of stay-at-home motherhood simply because I am clearly not smart enough to have a career.

It was around this time that my wonderful (though sometimes meddling) mother-in-law mentioned my situation to some lawyer friends of hers who also happen to work on the Law Faculty of my first choice Midwest Law School. One of them suggested I call him. I was not happy about having to discuss my failure with a member of the profession I wanted to enter but talking to him raised my spirits a bit. He gave me very useful advice about people in my Home State to contact who might know of job opportunities there. He also suggested that likely the reason I did not get into law school this year was because it was simply a particularly difficult year. Many more people applied and would likely accept admission because of the recession and this made it very challenging for more mediocre (my word, not his) candidates like myself. He also said that it was possible I could still be accepted because, at this time of year, a lot of candidates are sifting their various offers, declining or accepting offers, which may open up places for people to be taken off waitlists. Consequently, if candidates who are accepted to one school are offered a position at a better school, this opens up more places, which gives everyone still waiting a bit more of a chance. After talking to him I was more optimistic but still generally skeptical that anything would change.

Only two weeks later I got an email asking me if I was still interested in entering Midwest State School to study law and what was the likelihood that I would accept if given an offer. I said: 1.) Hell yeah I was still interested and 2.) The likelihood that I would accept was 100 f**king per cent. That was last Friday.

This Monday, I got the email that I had been accepted to study law at my first choice, Midwest Law School. So as it turns out, I’m going to be a lawyer after all!

LSAT Score

We got back our LSAT scores this past weekend. I did achieve the goal I set for myself but didn't see much improvement overall which was disappointing. I guess in the end Ivey was right that it isn't worth it to retake the LSAT. I also think I was right that I simply hit my natural wall. It's a disappointingly low wall.

I was about to go into a rant about standardised testing, but I'll save that for another time!

Anyway, I guess this is pretty much what expected, though not what I hoped for. I hope it will at least be enough to get me into my Midwest State School. I don't know what will happen if I don't get into a law school. I'll probably just curl up into a ball and die. I can't think of any other thing I want to do as much.

One of my British applications was one day late! It was a paper application that I had to mail in. There have been postal strikes all over the UK which have been extremely disruptive. I sent it FedEx to avoid that problem. It was meant to be delivered next day. The day after that I got a call that it hadn't been delivered yet because the envelope covering had been ripped off. So it actually didn't get delivered until the day after the deadline. I have no idea whether the university will take it.

It's like the universe doesn't want me to get into law school.

The LNAT exam is one week from today and I haven't cracked a book for it yet. I figure all that work for LSAT didn't help much, it probably won't help with LNAT, so I'm not going to work too hard on it. Cynical, cynical, cynical and pessimistic.

**************

In happier news, we have our tickets to come home for Christmas. I'm looking forward to blissful peace, cold, warmth, food, family, friends, driving in the snow and some R&R.

LSAT Tomorrow

I'm taking the LSAT tomorrow and I think it's a good time to describe my thoughts about it.

I took the LSAT once before after doing a 5-week Kaplan prep course and I did better than average, but not by much. I don't have too much difficulty with reasoning and reading comprehension. Reading comprehension is probably what I'm best at. I am slightly less successful with logical reasoning my greatest weakness being formal logic statements. My downfall, my Everest, is the logic games section. What logic games have to do with being a lawyer or even with studying law I have yet to understand. I think it has to do more with mental dexterity and juggling multiple details under pressure than solving problems. I've always been terrible at logic puzzles, since I was a child and could do them in math for extra credit. If it weren't for logic games, I would probably score pretty high on the LSAT. So I tell myself.

When I first started practicing them, I was lucky if I was able to finish one game out of four. I found them really, really difficult. Then I took the Kaplan course and improved somewhat, but not as much as I had hoped to improve. I was disappointed in the Kaplan prep course's approach to teaching logic games. I will explain why in a moment.

The first time I took the LSAT was two years ago. I had just started my master's degree and was already in classes when I took the exam. Once in my classes, I had very little time to keep up the LSAT prep and I felt that I did not do as well as I could have done. I also felt that I had failed to focus adequately on the area that gave me the most trouble and the area in which I could potentially see the most improvement, the logic games section.

This time around I began studying earlier in the hopes of improving, especially by focusing most of my time on logic games, while not ignoring improvements I could potentially make in the other sections. I kept up a fairly rigorous study schedule throughout the summer, accommodating holidays and special occasions as best I could. I worked long and hard, I have to admit that. I also have to admit I could have worked harder, although that would be true no matter how much I worked. I did LSAT practice between 1-3 hours every day for the past 17 weeks, and a practice test each Sunday morning. Looking at my little printed schedule right now, I'm faintly proud at how much I worked. But also disappointed. I can never seem to shake the thought that I could have done more.

In my study schedule, I spent 4 days each week doing logic games exclusively, then the other two between a mix of logical reasoning, reading comprehension and more logic games.

Over the 17 weeks, I have raised my LSAT score, according to my practice tests, by 6-7 points. I set an initial goal and have surpassed that, but find I am still disappointed, as on further research my goal score is still not good enough to bother applying for the Top 14 schools. They have gotten a lot more selective, competition has gotten stiffer with more people going back to school because of the recession, and my grade point average is not good enough to make up the deficiency of my LSAT score. I'm heaving a great sigh.

I am disappointed that my 'numbers' are too low to make me a serious contender for the top schools because my subjective factors are pretty good, I think, and I'm fairly certain I would do well at any school. And I was really looking forward to a good legal education at a law school that educates legal minds, instead of just cramming minds with law.

Despite losing that opportunity, I am still really excited about the prospect of studying law at the Midwest State School, for all the reasons I have articulated before. In fact, it will be a form of bliss.

Now about the Kaplan LSAT course. I said I was disappointed in their method of teaching logic games. I felt their teaching style was based too much an assumption of intuitive understanding. The teachers they hire are basically anyone who scored higher than 170 on their LSAT. I have a strong feeling that people who score higher than 170 have an ability naturally that the rest of us who take prep courses are trying to learn artifically. Their style of understanding is much more intuitive and automatic, because they're simply that bright and clearheaded. I however, am not that bright or clearheaded and I need things explained to me, step by step. The Kaplan teachers and the Kaplan method I felt assume you will understand something, or that you will become aware of something, simply by your own brilliance, a characteristic which I lack.

That's not to say that logic games can only be done using intuitive reasoning. Quite the opposite. People who don't get them naturally can be taught to do them, I firmly believe that, they just need more help and more instruction at each step to see the patterns and inferences which seem axiomatic to those more fortunate. I felt Kaplan did not teach to this type of student.

Now, for a digression. My Midwest State School has a study abroad programme for law students to come to London for a semester. I was not aware of that until day I saw a girl walking by on the street with a big sweatshirt of my Midwest State School. I stopped her and had a chat with her (another digression: I was coming home from a bad day and it was too irresistible to not take the opportunity of speaking to someone from home, when I knew it would be so comforting and familiar, and it was both). She told me about what she was studying at Midwest State School, and we discovered we had some friends and acquaintences in common. She also told me she had been a teacher for a prep course that was a rival to Kaplan and that they also felt Kaplan's method of teaching logic games was deficient. She recommended that although I couldn't take one of their courses in London, I should get one of their books.

Well, this year I got one of their books, the Logic Games Bible. If you struggle with logic games, I cannot recommend this book enough. It gave me exactly what I needed in terms of instruction and more importantly it taught me the cues or tools to recognise when there is an intuitive inference to be made. Suddenly it became far less intuitive and mysterious and incomprehensible and much more like a game with defined rules and recognisable patterns. It put logic games in a context such that they were amenable to being solved by skills rather than by luck or intuition.

From using this prep book, I was able to go from completing 2 games in one section to completing 3. The fourth is still elusive and there are still some types of games that I struggle and struggle with endlessly. I am still prone to inaccurate transcriptions, misread rules, a failure to understand the global view of a game (losing the forest for the trees, in a way) and I am still far too slow. If I had another 4 weeks to focus solely on logic games, I might improve.

Then again, I might not.

Sometimes I think I have simply hit my natural plateau and no amount of work will make me better. I struggle with the knowledge that I'm not as smart as I wish I was. Things don't seem to come as easily to me as they do to other people and I seem to need two cracks at something before I can do it right. Obviously, life rarely affords that kind of opportunity. Yes, I think I may have hit my natural wall on logic games. On the day of the exam, that is to say tomorrow, the types of questions they put on the logic games will determine how well I do on the section. If it's 3 relatively simple games and 1 hard game, I might come out all right. If it's 2 simple and 2 hard, I probably won't significantly improve my score. If it's 1 easy, 3 hard, it could very well be a complete disaster. I am doing practice sections from old exams. Sometimes it's a disaster, sometimes it's pretty successful. I guess my success will depend on my luck on the day.