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.

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!

My life is a series of shambolic episodes

I took the LNAT, law national admissions test, today. It's the admissions test for studying law in Britain.

Let me tell you something about my life. It is a series of shambolic episodes.

Avid readers will remember the episode of my being almost too late to take the LSAT.

Today I took the bus down to central London at an indecently early hour to take the LNAT. I had my test confirmation ticket, which they said to bring and ID. Now, this is what their website says are valid forms of ID:

A current signed passport (an unsigned passport will be acceptable only if it is of a biometric type that does not allow for a signature)

A current signed photocard driving licence (full or provisional)

A current identity card, issued by the government of the country where the test centre is located, that carries your photograph and signature

Now I'm no lawyer, but it doesn't seem to specify that the driving license has to be issued by the government of the country where the test centre is located, unlike the current identity card option. So I think, 'Great, I don't have to needlessly carry my passport into town, I can just use my valid driver's license from my home State.' NO, NO YOU CAN'T. It doesn't say it has to be British BUT IT DOES. DIDN'T YOU KNOW THAT???

Reader, I did not know this because the LNAT website is a piece of shit. So is the LNAT for that matter.

It wasn't a complete disaster. I just had to go back home and get my passport and come back, which isn't a big deal except that is a 2 hour round trip in London. I did it though and got through the exam.

It's funny all the prep books tell you that just before the exam you should take your mind off it, distract yourself with something else. Well, I was certainly distracted.

Now my complaints about the exam itself.

This exam is ridiculous. First, I took several practice tests and got massively widely differing scores on each one, which shows that it isn't a very reliable measuring tool. Second, for each question you could make a strong argument that a different answer was correct. The exam simultaneously requires you to think less, making intuitive generalisations and to think more--for some questions you have to make several assumptions or logical jumps to get the correct answer. In other words, some questions require a gospel reading, some require further interpretation and you never know which is which. Third, it is an extremely badly written exam. The question stem will ask, 'What are the people in the article arguing?' but their correct answer will answer the question, 'What is the author of the article arguing?'. These are clearly different questions. Fourth, although they claim no outside knowledge is required to answer the questions, sometimes it really is. You would be at a particular disadvantage if you were not British or British-educated. The passages are often about British politics and education and require certain foreknowledge about such things as the European Union or Council of Europe political mechanisms or about British standardised testing. Luckily I have been here long enough that I'm familiar with most of it. How is someone outside of the UK supposed to know what GCSEs are? I don't think I had ever used the word 'accession' before I came to the UK and studied the EU. Fifth, the LNAT makes up its own definitions for words and expects you to know them. Assumption, assertion, opinion, suggestion, fact--you would have to have foreknowledge of how they define these to answer the questions correctly.

I will get my LNAT score in January. By the way, what the hell is that about? You get your LSAT score in 3 weeks and it helps you decide what law schools you can apply to. Here you have to finish your applications before you even have to take the exam. And you don't get your score back until after you've been interviewed? Surely that doesn't make sense.

Sometimes you have to give up questioning why Britons do things the way Britons do them. Thinking about the fact that I spent 4 hours on a bus today makes me really excited about studying law at my Midwest State School where a commute is 20 minutes tops.

This concludes all application activities for British universities. It is entirely out of my hands now.

LNAT Practice; Let me tell you something about the LNAT

I've been doing some practice on the LNAT in preparation for taking the exam on Tuesday. I know, I know--this has been nothing like my LSAT prep. The LNAT and LSAT are very different tests though.

Let me tell you something about the LNAT.

First, the LNAT is only 2 hours long. It is comprised of an 80 minute section of 30 multiple choice questions based on 10 excerpts, followed by a 40 minute essay section. In contrast, the LSAT has 6 sections, 5 of which contain 23-38 multiple choice questions comprising 2 logical reasoning sections, one reading comprehension, one logic games and one experimental section of one of the three types, followed by an essay writing section. The LSAT takes about 4 hours of testing time.

Excluding the writing portion, the LNAT is basically just a longer version of the LSAT reading comprehension section, with 10 passages of shorter length, each with 2-4 questions. The final score is the number correct out of 30. The average score is around 17, which seems rather low.
The writing section, like the LSAT writing section, is unscored. The good news for me is that there is no logic games section on the LNAT. I always score the lowest on Logic Games and the highest on Reading Comprehension.

For this reason and because I have already done 4 months of preparation for the LSAT I have not been sweating the LNAT too much. Which is why I haven't gotten around to any prep for it until 2 days before the test. I took a practice test today and I was happy with my score. Hopefully I can reproduce it at the actual exam.

Finalised Cambridge Application; Let me tell you something about... British admission requirements

I have finished the last component of the Cambridge application and can't do anything more for it now.

Let me tell you something about British admission requirements. British high school students have it rough. At the age of 16 they have to take these big exams called GCSE exams. The most eager students take 10 in one year. The scores you receive on these exams determine what classes you can take in the next two years. Then at the end of those two years you take another set of massive exams called A-level exams. A-level exams and results determine what subject you can study and at what university. How cruel is that? I can't imagine having to decide at the age of 15/16 what I'm going to major in at university! I guess that has something to do with the increasing popularity of conversion courses and post-graduate diplomas that basically qualify you in a subject completely different from the one you studied in college.

Anyway, I mentioned before that the British university applications process is much simpler than the American undergraduate system because of the UCAS clearinghouse. Unless you've been educated somewhere where you don't do GCSEs and A-levels as I was. This makes it a lot harder to fill in the electronic application. Luckily I got good help from the adviceline and also sent in all my high school and university transcripts to substitute for it.

Most of the people applying for these degree courses are 17-18 year olds. I am old enough to be their... babysitter. I also already have a bachelor's and master's degree. Now I'm going back for another bachelor's. Yes, I'm a mature student.

British Applications: Mission Accomplished! Almost. (Let me tell you something about... British college applications)

I have submitted my British applications!

Let me tell you something about British college applications. They are SO much easier than American college applications! I know American law school apps go through a clearinghouse called LSDAS where you submit all your transcripts and information and you send a single application electronically to all the schools you want to apply to. In the UK they do that with undergraduate applications too with a system called UCAS. UCAS allows you to submit applications for up to 5 universities. I have mentioned the ones I'm applying to before.

Now that bit is done, there is only one more thing before my British applications are completely done and dusted: I have to take the LNAT. I'm registered and now I have to start preparing a bit. I have about 2 weeks.

And I have to start the American applications. Yikes!

The Game Set-up

This is the post in which I explain the situation.

As you probably know, I'm an American who has lived in Britain for the last three year. It is time for me to go to law school. Now I have to decide where to apply.

In the UK, law is an undergraduate subject. You can study law for three years from the age of 18 and poof you're a lawyer! Well, okay, it's not quite that simple. You also have to train to be either a solicitor or a barrister. Yes, you have to choose between being a solicitor or barrister. If I understand correctly, solicitors do all the work. Barristers do all the talking and paid more. (I think it may simply be a way for the law profession to make more money, but more on that later.) But would I be able to practice in the US?

If you have already done an undergraduate degree, as I have done, then you can apply to go back to the undergraduate law programme, or you can apply for something called a conversion course. It's a programme for people who already have a bachelor's degree in a different subject and want a law qualification. A conversion course is 2 years after which you are fully qualified to be a lawyer. But would I be able to practice in the US?

The other option for me is to go back to the US and do a 3 year juris doctor degree. This would make me fully qualified (except for passing the bar) to work in the States. But would I be able to practice in the UK?

Questions, questions.