Kaulapi World

Preparing for law school exams is a different animal all together. First off, if you’re cramming the week before exams, you’re probably screwed. Secondly it takes a crazy amount of concentration and tenacity to sit in one place and go over things again and again, recall a random case that you barely remember reading, and making some sense of how the facts and the holding even matter to what you’re trying to study. If you’re fortunate to have annual leave to take off, the weekdays and weekends blur together, if not, co-workers quickly notice the zombie like status you’ve succumbed to, trying to get through the day without thinking about how you really should’ve taken off to work on those outlines. Finally, its just a lot of stress and anxiety over a prolonged period of time, no matter how early you start, or how well prepared you are (or think you are).

You become very familiar to the workers at coffee shops and fast food diners where you end up eating 2, 3 meals a day (if at all). When you do sleep, the legal theories and concepts invade your dreams in very random and strange ways. You accidentally insult waitresses who are trying to be friendly because you are too distracted and feeling guilty for taking a break from studying to get something to eat. You fall asleep on the train writing notes for your paper on a yellow post-it pad and wake up suddenly when it drops from your hand. You fall asleep on the couch with a casebook in your lap and a draft outline in your hand.

This past month has been a perfect storm on just about every possible level imaginable. Leading up to my exam period was a crazy period at work processing the draft report that limited my month-before review time that I normally use to wrap up my notes and really hunker down on the studying. In past semesters I usually put in for annual leave during here and there in the month leading up to the exams, and definitely block off the days before and after. The deadlines for work just got rescheduled and put me in a bind.

Once I was able to push through the work tasks it hit me quickly how far behind I was as far as finishing up my paper and exam prep. It was pretty much sleepless nights and lots of coffee for the next 4 weeks. Earlier this week there were more distractions at work that I had to attend to while officially on leave, but still plugging away at my exams. Throw in some family drama the day of an exam, announcements for promotion paperwork due on the same day as another exam, announcements on agency-wide personnel changes at work the day after an exam, and it can all make you feel like you’re going crazy trying to juggle everything all at once. I’m sitting here typing it Saturday morning after it was all over, still not used to sleeping for more than 3 hours I’ve been up since about 5am trying to clear off my desk at home.

If anything at all this hell of an exam month has reiterated the difficulties of trying to attempt this degree program at night while holding a full time job. every time I think that I’ve gotten a handle on how to hack it I’m rudely reminded at how very wrong my assumptions were, and I’m left scratching my head on how to avoid all of this crap hitting me all at once. My preliminary conclusion is that for the most part I can’t. just hope for the best and suck it up.