WonL
The random thoughts of an architect-turned- lawyer from the deep south living in Washington, DC...
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
Exams start today
My first exam is not until Friday, so I have a bit of time. Yesterday, I was trying to find a quiet place to study and boy did I screw up...I went to school. Dear Lord! When you walk in the door, you immediately notice that exams are here. First off, there seem to be 2,000 extra students. Granted, we are one of the larger law schools in the country, but I have never seen any of these people before. Randoms everywhere! Where do you people come from? My little table in the basement of the library...you know the one with the secret hidden outlet where I usually sit and can spread out all my stuff? Yeah, well, there were about six people at that table yesterday.Second, you notice the increase in supplements and commercial outlines. All semester long, you see people lugging around the extremely large heavy casebooks that all of our reading comes from. People are now ditching the casebooks for a lighter soft cover supplement (which is really some law school professor's synopsis of another law school professor's condensed version of an area of the law). Note to 1Ls: when you buy four different supplements for a subject, it defeats the purpose of "less" reading. (I figured that out the hard way.)
Mostly, though, mostly you notice the raw emotion. People are stressed! It's not like they are running around, yelling, crying, or punching. The signs are not so outwardly, but you can just feel it. The blank stares in people's eyes, the wardrobe deterioration from lack of clean clothing, the greasy hair from lack of showering and the sleeping kids on sofas in the lobby from lack of - well, um, sleep.
I'm glad I am not stressed like that. I mean I am only up to 8 cups of coffee daily, have only pulled out all of my hair (strand by strand), threatened to jump off the roof twice, and yelled at my mom in Target for wandering off when I have to go home and study for exams! I would say I am handling this quite well:-)
UNFAIR: I just looked down and smiled to see that I have now completely covered 431 pages of GoCo law. Then, I quit smiling when I thought about the grand total of 946 pages of material in this class. This is absurd!