Buying more books; other perspectives

The count down timer I’ve (perhaps unwisely) installed on my desktop says that I now have 90 days until classes begin.

Today I went to the bookstore and read a small Kaplan book on other people’s perspectives during the first year. There were so many conflicting reports: buy the hornbooks, don’t buy the hornbooks, be terrified because it will help you work harder, don’t worry and you’ll do better, be wary of your classmates because they will try to trip you up, the workload is tremendous and NOTHING ON THIS EARTH CAN PREPARE YOU FOR THE SHOCK.

Okay, that’s great. Fear can be a healthy motivator. Eventually I will figure things out and learn the best study method for myself. But my emotions are what concern me. My whole life they’ve been kind of magnified, and if I’m completely blindsided by something awful that affects me on a deep and personal level, I will cry about it. I’m getting better, but it’s still completely impossible for me to say, “Cheer up and smile and you’ll get past it.” It doesn’t work that way for me.

Crying it out is the best solution because I do it and then it’s over and I feel a huge sense of relief before I dust myself off and start making lists, planning on how I can make things better. But my biggest fear in going into this isn’t that I’ll fail, or that I won’t understand (even though I am scared of those things like everyone else)–but that I’ll cry in class. I don’t cry out of fear or sadness, but rather a sense of anger and frustration with myself for not understanding. And that could be a problem. One that I’m being given the opportunity to work on, however. Something someone said in that book made sense to me: everyone else is going to be so wrapped up in themselves and their problems that they probably won’t even realize that you’ve made a mistake or that you are being humiliated.

So if the Socratic Method is what they use in law school, so be it. I will roll with the punches and learn to duck and dodge with just a bit of skill rather than to tense up and try to avoid it unsuccessfully. I have to treat every class like being on a stage and be totally ready to perform for the worst critics. Planning ahead and preparing myself emotionally is probably going to be the best coping mechanism for me this summer. I have several books that all claim to know the for real deal on 1L, but for me, learning how to hold out grace under fire is something I’ve been needing to–not learn, but enhance or refine as a pretty good life skill.

I don’t plan on making this into a sob blog–I’d much rather talk about what I’m learning. Older students who are coming back into the fold have a remarkable advantage over those of us who are still young and inexperienced: as much as you all might think we still have the energy and competitive drive to do this, you have years of good and bad behind you. You’re able to deal with shit much more nimbly and with a moderation of feelings that I think being young just doesn’t afford us. I think older students can look at the whole “dramatic terror of law school” with a more detached eye and recognize that life goes on. You pick yourself up and move on, because three years are just a drop in the bucket.

 

Software being that I have a Mac

I spent hours today looking through this useful list trying to decide whether I wanted OmniOutlinerPro and OmniGraffler.

As it turns out, I ultimately preferred Circus Ponies NoteBook, which is very visual and looks like a real notebook. I do prefer at least a simulacra of the real thing rather than a bunch of words in a long white sidebar. As of May 2008, the NoteBook is still in version 2.1, but they’ve just announced what 3.0 will be like at MacWorld.

Some of the new features include a flowchart system much like what OmniGraffler is offering, along with a few other very useful features. Right now the academic price is set at about $30, full price being $50, but that is set to go up to $70 when the new version is released sometime this summer. I’m glad I bought in, because I get the upgrade for free.

All I have to do now is figure out if iProcrastinate is the right organizing app for my classwork. I doubt I’ll need weekly reminders of when to buy groceries, so maybe if I having meetings and such I can just list them through iCal or the Anxiety task runner that hooks up to the calendar feature already in Mac.

There’s only one last program I’m strongly considering, and that’s TypeIt4Me. Using shorthand commands to produce words I’m likely going to be typing for the rest of my life, like plaintiff or defendant or appellate, does sound like a pretty good replacement. It’s too bad there isn’t a demo copy available for trial.

Sweetness out.

 

That weird feeling in the back of my mind

Suddenly this is starting to feel less and less like something I can analyze from a distance, and for all the confidence I think I have, it’s still pretty scary.

Sort of like walking around on some snow before sitting down on a nice toboggan, pushing off what you think is the side of a little hill in the park and then suddenly realizing that you’re luging from the top of the Alps. What’s this? I’m hurtling down the side of a mountain towards a seemingly inevitable doom? Well, that’s just crazy. It’s May, why is there snow?

At least I’m not alone, though. Some interesting and highly informative 1L blogs out there, and it helps to see that everyone else is scared shitless at least 85% of the time too.

It’s not that I don’t think I can do it, or that I have a specific fear in mind (I like to think I’m relatively intelligent because I didn’t psych myself out and read 1L or watch The Paper Chase), it’s mostly the idea of doing something new again, and especially living on my own. I have all these questions for myself, and I think it’s a means of distracting my brain before it has to focus on big words and huge reading sections again.

For example, I’m all caught up with how I’m going to cook for myself, and how I’ll decorate my room in the apartment. These are things, my parents tell me, that I shouldn’t really have to worry about until later in life, when I’m serious about where I’m shacking up. I could have gone to University of Hometown and lived with them for another year, but with my brother back in the house, things would have gotten pretty crowded anyway. Besides, it makes more sense to share the experience with other people.

Hopefully just not the kind of people who go around screaming about how law school was the worst decision of their life and go to Bar Review to make themselves feel better about graded Oral Arguments.

I haven’t even gotten my class schedule yet, and things are starting to kick into gear. Do I cut my books? What kind of paper should I buy? Should I get a note-taking program for my laptop? Will my MacBook be sufficient for note-taking?

It’s enough to know that other people out there are going YES IT’S ALL GOING TO BE OKAY, but it doesn’t completely reassure me. My brain is just aching for something to dramatize about, I guess, so whether or not to buy a new set of knives is going to be what keeps me awake at night.

 

An introductory post would be nice

So here’s my deal. I graduated in May of 2007, moved home, and began working for a temp agency. I had left college with little to no idea of what I wanted to do. Being an English major, I had spent four years analyzing and critiquing books and writing enormous papers about them, and so I wasn’t really up for the idea of being an English graduate student. People would always be asking me, “So are you going to teach?” I don’t like to teach. It’s not my thing.

Instead, my parents had this idea of getting me to apply for law school. I had taken the LSAT in December of 07 and was disappointed by the results. So upon coming home, my parents sat me down and explained some things to me. I could live in their house, rent free, with the entire upstairs to myself, as long as I did two things. Kept a consistent job and improved the LSAT score.

I spent the summer in a course for the acceptance exam, and managed to raise my score by quite a few points by September. Bolstered by that kind of “holy shit maybe I can actually do this” realization, I applied to a handful of private and public schools. I got some decent scholarships, even managing to get into a school where my cousin had graduated from and gone on to get the highest Bar exam score of anyone in her state. Or something like that. As much as I love my cousin, I was not about to enter a world where my grandmother, who already makes incessant comparisons between her relatives as some kind of bizarre expression of interest in our lives, would have further reason to compare us. For the rest of our lives.

So I am about to send off my deposit to a state school, where I am glad to have been accepted. It’s a good program, with a brand new library and courtroom where the Supreme Court of my state frequently convenes. There are study abroad opportunities, the school is nationally ranked so there could be better opportunities for summer jobs and beyond, and I am a state resident so the cost is not phenomenally high.

All of these things, of course, mean that I am scared fuckless about going there. Normally anyone gets cold feet about starting a new program, so I kind of expect it, and I’m working on rolling with the questions that I sometimes lose sleep over. Was my score good enough? Does the LSAT really predict how well you do in law school? I am at the lower end of their average scale–does that mean I’m doomed to hate it when I get there? Was undergraduate enough preparation for something this big and terrifying? What if I don’t like it when I get there? What if I fail? Will my parents let me move back in with them to pick up the pieces again?

There aren’t too many questions I haven’t asked myself about law school, but for right now the main thing is that I’m getting there. Figuring things out as I go. It’s not an impossible thing to do if there are too many lawyers in the world like everyone says there are. I think the hardest part is probably distinguishing yourself as a good attorney while maintaining a sense of dignity and reason for being there in the first place.

So there’s a general introduction.