Good Luck!

To everyone taking the bar exam right now, try not to freak out. You only have to do better than about half the people in the room with you. So if the kid on your left freaks out and starts sobbing, and the kid on your right doesn't show up for the second day, you're golden.

Is It Too Late?

Is it too late to decide to take a bar exam this summer? I can't decide. I guess it must not be, since I didn't really get serious about it the first time until July.

I was specifically thinking about Maryland, since it looks like I am about to move there. I finished my LLM and can't find a real job, so I asked my current job to transfer me to the DC office. Of course, as soon as my transfer was approved I didn't want to go anymore. But I think I'm just fearing change at the last minute. I've been wanting to get out of Boston for a while now. It's all well and good to live here while you're in school, or to be born here and never leave, but it doesn't have that much going on once you're done with school. I guess the plan is to move in with my parents (aggh! nooo!) temporarily and see if I can't find a job in NY or DC. Or back here I guess. I do have one more interview to go on before I leave. I feel like going through all the hassle and shelling out all the cash to haul all my stuff out of here would be just the thing the universe is waiting for to finally get me an offer up here. Cause clearly the universe gets a real kick out of laughing at me.

Fear Is In The Air

Does it count as popular demand if there's only one person demanding it? I'm going to go with yes and give you a little update.

So I picked the worst year of my lifetime to graduate my LLM program - way to go me! I still believe if I had graduated last year, I would have a job by now. But never fear, I do have three interviews. I had one about a week ago and two this Thursday at our "big" spring career fair, which is actually quite small and ridiculously disappointing. It was all BigLaw, which is out of our league, and accounting firms. I had a miserable dream last night that I woke up an hour after my interviews should have been and went downstairs and my mother was like "oh I let you sleep because they called and said your interviews were cancelled!" The most horrifying part of the whole dream, I have to say, was that I was clearly back living with my mother. I admit I have been thinking about it in that "what would I do if this plane crashed" sort of way (answer: climb over the backs of the slow and weak to get the hell down that slide), but I think my dream showed me how completely wrong it would be to actually live it. I am almost 30 years old, and I will work in a fish gutting plant before I move back in with my parents. So there.

If you like the personal details, I'm going through what is essentially a miniature divorce with my boyfriend of five years. I swear to god if I make it out of this I am never living with anyone ever again, not even if I get married. The only bright side is that it's still about two months until final exams, so I should have at least a chance of pulling it back together by then. We are still in negotiations, I suppose, technically, but none of my interviews are even in the city we currently live in so.... whatever. All the better. It's too damn cold and snowy up here anyway.

Oops well it's almost 9:30 now, and that is my bedtime, because I am old and frail and get up at 6am.

Good luck to everyone who's about to take the wretched, awful bar exam. My best advice is to take a xanax or something both nights before. Something you have taken before and are familiar with the effects of. If I hadn't slept like a baby both nights before, I don't know what I would have done. My second best advice is to spend your last day reviewing the thing you suck the most at that you know will come up. For me, that was state civil procedure. You know the things you pretty much know as well as you're going to by now, so you might as well make a last ditch effort to memorize a few of those 60-day filing deadlines rather than trying to do one last massive review session.

LTNS

My boss just found out he failed the bar exam for either the 4th or 5th time. This makes for a crabby boss, which filters down to a crabby me. As you might expect, he didn't announce it, but everyone somehow knows. My non-lawyer coworkers have been making stealthy trips to my cube all week to ask me just how that is possible, but I honestly don't know. He must just be really, really, really bad at standardized tests. Or maybe he has panic attacks when he has to take a test. He seems pretty smart in general, so I have no idea.

In other news, I wish I had done my LLM full time and graduated last year with a job, instead of going part time and graduating this year when there will be no jobs. I don't know what I'm going to do, because there is No Way I'm keeping the job I have for longer than another year. Preferably no longer than through August.

Although I am getting a big fat 25% raise in a month. And if there's any money left over in the budget (not likely) I qualify for a bonus based on my annual review. Woohoo! Don't get too excited for me though. All that will only just bring me up to what I would be making on my first day if I could ever manage to get an actual attorney job with the government.

Bar Exam News, Again, For Once

Virginia's February bar results are out, and my friend passed! Good for her! I kept telling her she just freaked out the first time and would be fine. She's about to take another bar in July, because she has foresaken the state of Virginia, but she feels like she's going to do fine. Which is good, because she will. She's also wondering if there's any professional application to Commercial Paper, which she is now an expert in, having studied the fine, archaic points of the subject for the last year or so. I'm going to go ahead and guess no on that one.

In other news, it's the last day of classes here, finally, thank god. There were a bunch of 1L's in the hallway all giddy from having given their professors their presents. Do all law schools have this stupid tradition? I can't imagine what ever possessed people to want to give multiple expensive presents, much nicer than anything they could afford for themselves, to the sadists who tortured them all year. Maybe it's Stockholm Syndrome, but I did not suffer from that, although first year was certainly all about suffering, and so I still don't understand.

As I walked up to the buliding, there were also four girls, who I can only assume were undergrads, conducting some sort of parade down the main street on campus, bearing posterboard signs I was too far away to read, and a six foot inflatable p enis. I know it was six feet long, because I had to inflate one manually once, in college. They went into the School of Religion with it.

I'm also moderately excited to notice that my little blog counter thing recently went over 10,000. I guess a lot of people hate the bar exam. Shocking, I know, but apparently true.

This Is Why I Still Hate The Bar Exam

Back in the spring of 2000, I studied in France for a semester. There were a bunch of smart girls on my program; one in particular who had been in an awful car accident that took a year to recover from, but was still going to graduate with a 3.98 something. I was starting to look at grad school that semester, since I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life after graduating with a degree in Sorority Life and a minor in Oh God I Shouldn't Have Had That Tequila.

My friend suggested that I go to law school. (And she knows I blame her to this day for how that turned out, but that's a different story.) She said I was smart and that it made sense for smart women to become lawyers. She convinced me. We were going to be human rights lawyers and live in the South of France and make beauty products from lavendar in our spare time.

So I took the LSAT and went to law school. She chickened out at the last minute because she gets awful test anxiety, despite the ridiculously high GPA, so she ended up a year behind me.

She took her evil bar exam this year. The results came out from her state last week. I've checked multiple times, but unless she seriously changed her name without telling me, she is not on the list of people who passed.

It's just so ridiculous. I know on an intellectual level that smart people must fail the bar all the time, but what I forced myself to believe when I had to take it myself was that smart people didn't fail. I figured stupid people failed; people who didn't take studying seriously failed; people who were going through a messy divorce failed; people with a new baby at home failed; people who were in car accidents on the way to the testing site failed. There had to be something else going on for people to fail. But why should smart people who would make excellent lawyers fail? Why would we want to keep smart, great lawyers out of the profession? It doesn't make any sense. And god knows I had this concept beaten out of me in first semester Criminal Law, but it's not FAIR.

She already has a job, so she's going to have to work full time while she tries to study for February. She also failed her MPRE, so she's already got to study for that this fall, too. And her test anxiety is already bad, but I just know the pressure of feeling like she has to pass or else she'll get fired is going to affect her. Argh. Not fair at all.