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.

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.

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.

Judgment for the Plaintiff in the Amount of One Career

See previous post if you are confused about place and person names.

On the train to Edinburgh (pronounce it ed-in-brrrrrrra; roll the ‘r’).

My husband (who needs a name in this drama-tragedy, so from now on he will be called The Economist) and I are going to spend a few days in Scotland on the Isle of Skye. We have gone to Scotland every summer since we have lived in Britain (except the first, but that’s a story for another time); we absolutely love it—if I could live anywhere in the world I would live in the northern Highlands. The landscape is so beautiful, rugged and spectacular as to make you doubt your eyes. In the summer the sun stays out until 11:30 at night. It is not overly warm and you have to have clear weather to really get the full enjoyment of it, but we have always been lucky in that respect. Plus, when we come to Scotland, it is always to go walking (or hiking as we might say in the US) and the cooler weather is ideally suited for strenuous outdoor activity. We are also very fond of Edinburgh (whence came many illustrious personages including Adam Smith and J.K. Rowling). It is out of the way, calm and relaxed, unlike London, yet still very cosmopolitan.

This year, we are taking the train to Edinburgh and renting a car to drive to Skye. Our route will take us through the extraordinary region of Glen Coe, along the western coast and across to the western isles. We rented a cottage on Skye and we’ll use that as a base for walking trips during the days, augmented with time for reading and relaxation. In addition, probably a good amount of time will be spent in the local pubs watching World Cup action.

I love a long train trip dearly and I will miss these times when we’re back in the US.

Still, there are other reasons to look forward to it. Now that I have been accepted to law school, I have gone from Total Failure to ambitious go-getter overnight. I return home in semi-triumph.

I do recognise that my life is about to change in significant ways. (For one, I have to stop using British spellings for everything.) I am moving back to the town where I grew up and where I went to college. I have deeply missed it in the times when England was kicking my butt. I wanted nothing more than to get into law school at The University of Pomorum and immerse myself in law study without the distractions of a big city. Now that it has happened, I’ve discovered the truth in the adage ‘Be careful what you wish for’.

There are so many good things about this situation. I’m going to a well-regarded, 1^st tier law school, paying in-state tuition. I will be living at my in-law’s house (they will not be living there during this time) so I will not be paying rent, not to mention that it is a really nice house. I will have a dishwasher (live in Britain for 4 years and you will be left in no doubt of how much a dishwasher adds to your quality of life). The combination of in-state tuition and not paying rent will mean that I will graduate with much less debt than most people and will therefore have more options when I graduate. Not to mention the amelioration of the burden of repaying the loans. I will, as I said, be able to immerse myself in the study of law without the distractions of big city life. This includes the fact that I will no longer have an outrageous commute to get anywhere—one of the prime benefits of small-town life. I will have a car (or at least access to one) which means greater independence, always a good thing. This being my hometown, I will have no learning curves when it comes to orientation. I know exactly where to go, where to shop, where to get books, where to get coffee, where to go to the gym, what traffic is like at various times of the day, and any number of other tidbits about living in a town with which my intimacy was forged in infancy. I will also know that access to the law school is hopeless on football Saturdays. I believe that my comfort with the town itself will help me get my feet under me when it comes to studying.

I used to work in the research laboratory of a very famous professor who had repeatedly been given offers from the most prestigious institutions in the country to move his lab there, but he chose to remain in my home state for more than 20 years now because he felt the other places were located in cities which would prove too distracting to his employees. I think there is a lot of sense in that notion (although his employees seemed to get up to a lot of mischief anyway). I hope that in the quiet and the calm tranquility of my hometown, I will be able to focus myself fully on school, achieving perhaps a state of one-ness with the law, absorbing the law, and otherwise learning to love the law with all my meek little heart!

Since this is my hometown and I plan to live here for a while I will also be able to work on the dreaded networking. The fact that you can be helped in your career just because of the people you know is completely distasteful and repellant to me, but apparently, as I am constantly told, it’s the way the world works. So who am I to fight it? (Secretly I’m going to destroy the system from within.)

One more thing: going home means that I can finally use all the wonderful gifts I got from my wedding four years ago which have been sitting in my in-law’s storage room, collecting dust and running out their warranties. My husband and I are the types of people who really enjoy things—not expensive things, not things that demonstrate wealth or status, but things that have sentimental value: that remind us of great trips we’ve taken or that make us think of the friends who gave them to us. Sometimes, like when we are home for Christmas, I like to just go visit my wedding things in the basement, thinking of the day when I will finally be able to use them and start making my own home. That day is coming soon!

Another benefit in my new life is that it will truly feel like life, or at least the next step, rather than a holding pattern, which is how England has felt for the last 2 years. Being a law student makes me feel like an adult—because only serious adults go the law school, right? Right?

You see, I have a 15 year plan which I will elucidate at another time. If I didn’t get into law school this year, it would have thrown my whole plan off. Disaster averted!

So you see, this situation is almost ideal and I know it is exactly what I need to do, what I should do; it is nearly the best possible outcome that was within the realm of possibility for me. But in my state of depression and longing for home, I did not give much thought to some of the downsides.

Unfortunately this does mean that I will not be living in the same place as The Economist.However, we realized some time ago that this was inevitable, considering that we only overlapped in applications on two schools, and neither of us got into either one. A lot of people have advised us that career-oriented couples often have to spend some time apart from each other, especially during grad school. We always viewed it as a last resort, and unfortunately it has come to just that. The good news is that we are only 2 hours’ drive apart which is not bad, considering that the other available option was for The Economist to stay in London and for me to be in the Midwest. We prefer this. We will both have a car and will alternate driving on the weekends. If we’re lucky one or both of us will avoid classes Friday or Monday. It is the best we can do. The Economist has applied to take a 1-bedroom apartment in Cowville, where he is doing his PhD. I am really delighted that I will have a roommate, my husband’s cousin, who is doing her MBA. She is a lovely girl I have always gotten along with and it will be nice to have a roommate.

Another negative to which I had not given much thought is the fact that my home state of Pomorum gets damn cold in the winter. Having lived in the highly temperate Britain for four winters, I’m scared I have become a real wimp about the cold. It troubles me because I am a Midwestern girl with cold, ice, snow, rain, tornadoes, humidity, thunderstorms and heat in my bones and I’m worried I’ve gone soft. I always love the bracing cold and the snow when I go home for Christmas, but I’ve only had it in small doses for the last four years. What will it be like to have months of it on end? Now that I’ll be living in a house, will I be expected to shovel snow?!!? This horrifies me, I always hated shoveling snow.

Plus, I’ve always found British winters to be much worse than Pomorum winters. In the UK, it never gets below freezing, so although it’s cold you never get snow. It’s just cold rain.Consequently, everything feels cold and clammy and wet rather than bone-chilling but dry. Plus, in the UK, you can go weeks without seeing a single ray of sunshine. Between the grey of the sky and the grey of the wet concrete, it can be pretty depressing. In Pomorum you get clear skies even in the winter with a layer of snow that reflects light all around and is, frankly, beautiful. I am counting on those sunny days to sustain me in the long cold winter months.

Another semi-con/semi-pro is the fact that we will be closer to our families. I put this in the overall con column because I am feeling wary about this at the moment. We love our families of course but we have really enjoyed our total freedom and independence these last few years. I am someone who particularly prizes liberty and independence, having seen too little of them as a child, and I am concerned what being so near family will do to my sanity.

Finally, I mentioned before that there isn’t much to distract in my hometown. Neither is there much to entertain. I will truly miss the big city arts of London: world-class museums, theatre, music, dance, etc. In my hometown, there isn’t much to do beyond going to the mall, seeing movies, going drinking and going bowling. It is a good study environment but not very exciting.Yet, I seriously doubt this will be a problem as my life will be consumed with school and little else.

So do the pros outweigh the cons in this situation?

Overall my judgment is for the plaintiff. The Isle of Skye notwithstanding, I cannot wait to begin my new life as a University of Pomorum law student.

Oxbridge Collegiate System

Did I ever explain this whole Oxbridge college thing? Let me tell you something about that.

Oxford and Cambridge Universities use a collegiate system. That is, there are two distinct parts of the 'university' as a whole. First, there are academic departments called faculties--faculty of law, of economics, etc etc etc. The faculties are responsible for delivering lectures and administering exams. That is their job, exclusively. Second, there are a collection (around 30 at each university) of colleges. A college can roughly be thought of as a combination of an American-style dorm and a Hogwart's-style house. Each student is a member of a college and all their university activities outside of lectures and exams take place in college. They live in college, do sports with their college, have social events, student government and all those types of things with their college mates.

Also, and this is the most important aspect, each college will have several fellows in each subject who are employed in the faculties of the university. They are members of the college in which they are fellows and are responsible for being what in the US we would call TAs (teaching assistants). The faculties handle lectures and the colleges handle small group sections, which my university called discussions. Other American universities call them seminars, tutorials, small group, or whatever. Obviously in lecture there can be hundreds of students. In order to discuss the subject and answer questions, you have a discussion section of around 30 students. In the Oxbridge collegiate system, because the numbers are so small and because each college employs several fellows, undergraduates will have these discussion sections (with an eminent expert in each field of study) in groups of two or three. Sometimes one-on-one. If you are a fan of learning and discussing what you're learning with someone with so much knowledge to impart, you understand what an amazing system this is. This is what separates Oxbridge from everywhere else in the world.

It's also one of the reasons I want to go there.

I did my master's degree at another well-regarded British university (let's call it my Master's University) and unfortunately had a disappointing experience in some ways. Most importantly I was disappointed in the commitment level of the other students. They didn't seem genuinely interested in the subject and it diminished the academic experience for me. I like learning, I loved the subject I was studying (mostly). It frustrates me to be in classes with people who fail to prepare for discussion, who have no enthusiasm for the subject at hand. I suspect that since Oxbridge are such aspirational institutions I would be with students who are more keen and I would really appreciate that.

Gunner in the making.

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.