The MPRE (Multi-state Professional Responsibility Exam)...

...and other ways to kill a Saturday. Yes, it's been a few months since I last posted, but there just wasn't all that much going on in the world of law school. I did feel the need to inform you about the MPRE though. This is something you have to take eventually, but you can take it before you graduate and they actually recommend doing it before that point. It's a 60 question multiple choice test with little scenarios and you have to decide what is right and wrong--but not according to your own morals and ethics, but according the to the rules of professional conduct or something like that. Essentially, it follows logic and most morals, but deviates enough ways that you couldn't pass it easily without studying. Speaking of studying, you can take a 5 hr review course put on by BARBRI. This is worth your time. It's a crash course of the material and will give you a pretty good heads up. They give you an outline with blanks on every few pages that you fill in as you go along (they refer to it as mad libs, but I didn't think it was that fun). They also recommend you spend something like 20 hours preparing for it outside of that class. I disagree. If you have had professional responsibility, and take the review course, you'll remember a lot more than you think. I spent a total of no more than 10 hours studying for this--including the 5 hr review course. I felt like I did pretty good, but we'll see when the scores come out in a month.

You have to register for the test before hand and when you do, you select the testing center you prefer, but that doesn't mean you'll get it. If you sign up earlier you're more likely to get what you want. I took it at the Javits Center with probably a thousand other students. We actually stood in line to get checked in longer than it took me to take the exam. (You have two hours for the exam, it took me 1 1/2 hours.) Overall, it was not a bad place to test. They tell you before hand that you can't have a cell phone or mp3 player or food or anything, but everyone showed up with that stuff and they were just told to put it under their seats. So, I could have been studying for the time we were in line, but I didn't bring my book. Luckily I was standing next to people from school and I had someone to talk to and keep relaxed. Anyway, I think I've brought up the key points about the MPRE that you need to keep in mind. Don't stress about it, if you fail you can always take it next time.

As for the rest of school, I'm tired of classes. This is the first semester that we haven't had a decent break in the middle and it's starting to wear on me, but it is nearly over. Only 3 more weeks of class before finals. Crazy! I've already had one half semester class end. I've had two supposed "interviews" from OCI, but they turned out not to really be interviews because the JAG from Navy and AF don't actually interview on campus, they just give an information session, oh, and of course they don't tell you it's not a real interview until you show up for it. Oh well. I'm keeping my eyes out for job opportunities that might interest me and I'm not stressing. There are plenty of jobs out there and I have plenty of motivation (read: debt) to go find one. I think it's important to keep your cool about it. If you really want a job you can get one!

WARNING: Student Loans can be hazardous...

...to your credit rating! So, now with the internship over and a little free time for three weeks, I thought I would accomplish something important like getting financial aid squared away for this last year of school. This inflation stuff is amazing, tuition has gone up almost $5K in the short time I've gone to school here. I'm not sure, but I think that is inversely proportional to Cardozo's ranking as a law school. I'm not sure though, that seems to involve math, and seeing as how I'm in law school you can probably guess how good I am at math. One of the funniest things about law school and math is going out to eat and trying to figure out who owes how much and what kind of tip we should leave. Someone always walks away from the table with more money than they put in, but alas, I digress.

The real reason for the post today was to comment on the fact that student loans can have an adverse affect on your credit rating. I guess something about having really high balances and no income is not very impressive to the credit companies. The good thing is that you just have to tell them you're in law school, and they're like, oh, alright, you're cool. Seriously. Anyway, I was trying to figure out what loans to take out and it turns out that the PLUS loan was the best because my credit rating had gotten worse and so a private loan wasn't as good for me. I did do the obligatory credit report run after to make sure everything is in order. It was. If you weren't aware (this is something I had re-emphasized to me this summer), you can get free credit reports from each of the three bureaus by going to www.annualcreditreport.com It is good to check all three reports because sometimes they will have discrepancies and that is what you want look for to make sure you aren't the victim of identify theft or something of the like.

Another thought about getting my finances lined up is that I'm in a lot of debt. Yeah, this wasn't cheap. I kinda have to pretend like I don't see the total or that it is just play money or something so I don't start to hyperventilate and freak out about a mortgage sized student loan debt! The good thing is that getting a law degree significantly increases your earning power and so hopefully I won't be in over my head.

And just like that...

...your second summer internship is over and you're a mere 3 weeks away from beginning your 3L year. Wow! I can't believe that a year from now I will be done with law school and have already (probably) taken the bar. Crazy.

Yes, I finished my internship yesterday. It was just an ordinary day. I wasn't sad for it to end, nor was I happy. It was a good experience. I learned a lot from it, I made a little money, I met some nice people, and I have another line for my resume. I mean, that's what it is all about isn't it? Sort of, I guess. Anyway, here are, in no particular order, some things I learned this summer:

A summer heat wave in the city can be brutal.
Taking a book to read for fun will make a 30 minute commut a lot more bearable.
Taking a portable fan will make standing on the subway platform a lot more bearable.
If you plan on eating lunch regularly in midtown, then you can plan on spending a lot of money!
Credit card companies will extend you credit even when they can see you are not capable of paying them. They will even do this when you have 20 other cards!
Some people manage to live in NYC on less than $700 of government assistance a month.
People who are unemployed and have no income besides Social Security are rarely home to answer their phone and usually to busy to make it to an appointment. (I think part of the problem is they like to show up early for things when they do have an appointment, like sometimes an hour early.)

Yeah, so those are a few things I learned. So, what else am I up to. Well, I did have an interview for an internship for the school year and it is in an area of law I'd like to pursue, but I turned it down (I had my reasons). Then they called back and asked me to reconsider, so I am reconsidering. I'm working on a show for the NY International Fringe Festival. It will take up my time for the next few weeks until school starts. Oh, the coolest thing ever I learned this summer was the location of my long lost uncle. My mom hasn't spoken with her brother in 28 years; they lost contact and we thought he had vanished. I was doing a public records search on a client and thought to look for my uncle's name while I was doing that and voila, one thing led to another and I found him. That was a nice bonus.

The more you observe the world around you...

...the more obvious some things become. Yeah, that's a deep thought, well at least the kind of deep thought that I'm having at this time of year. It's something different to be out of school for a while and focusing on the real world when you still have a year remaining. Our supervisor has been on vacation for the last two weeks (with one week remaining). We've been doing our job and getting things done, but today it seemed our office was concerned with more important things: jobs. That meant for two of the three interns printing up resumes and cover letters to submit for OCI. All of us go to different schools and so we have different deadlines, but they seem to have a lot of the same ones while Cardozo is on a completely different path. For instance, my OCI stuff was do on Monday while theirs is due on Friday. They registered for fall classes about a month ago and I register next Monday. It's frustrating at times to be forced to compare myself and Cardozo to other schools and ways of doing things. Of course, my way of doing things is probably different from the rest of the world, but still... So, they spent today printing their resumes on 100% cotton resume paper. Gimme a break. Apparently, this is normal behavior, but I've never been introduced to this practice. Is the paper the resume is printed on going to make that much of a difference? One comforting thing is that everyone gets shafted by their Office of Career Services, in some ways we were lucky because our OCI process was almost entirely online. This is the first time I got involved with applying since I was in the middle of nowhere last summer. It's an interesting process and I can already see that the chances of these efforts being fruitful are slim to none, but alas, we do what me must to be able to say we made the effort.

I've been a bit lost lately. Worried about the mounting student loan debt that will more than likely never be dischargeable in bankruptcy (see, I've learned at least one thing this summer--though, just this week I was working on a case that happens to be an exception to this rule--lucky her!) and stressing about keeping up with everyone else, I am easily swayed into seeing things from the wrong angle. I forget to hold on to the attitude that got me this far and has proven more than worthy in the past. I know that I will find a job. I know that things will work out and I will be able to pay off my loans. I know that I can do this without spending extra money on special resume paper (though I might give it a try down the road if things still aren't working out). This internship has been a good thing. I have learned a lot and have helped some people. It's funny, I didn't really come to law school to help other people. Well, in a way I did, I wanted to make money so I could finance my friends projects and make money off of them, but here I am actually helping some people help themselves and give them a fresh start. I think this is even considered public interest work. And yes, I did mock public interest work in my past. It might not be such a bad thing. What is even funnier is that while considering my classes for next semester, I'm considering fulfilling the requirements for a certificate in Alternative Dispute Resolution. Totally the opposite of what I would have predicted 2 years ago, but life has a funny way of shifting things on us like that, doesn't it.

Welcome to the working world of an intern,

...go ahead and put your feet up until we have something for you to do! Yeah, right. I finished my first week as an intern and it was actually like that. Not completely, but we're in a transitional phase where we're getting things set up and ready so that we can spend the rest of the summer working hard. So, what do I think about being an intern in Midtown? Well, first of all, I'm really not used to the whole 9-5 thing and if I never had to get used to it, I don't think it would bother me much. It's kind of neat to commute to 42nd St. and get off and walk through the throngs with the others going to work and all the tourists. We, the interns, have a small office that is a lot like a cave, and in fact used to be a coat check closet, but it is great because it gives us a place to work and really makes us feel like we belong. We got to help with a conference and discovered that there are an elite class of party crashers that like to drink wine at receptions following CLE courses! All in all, it was a good week and it bodes well for a good summer and a good experience. I'll let you know if that is really the case at the end of the summer.

It has been a good solid two weeks since finals were officially over and I have only gotten one grade back out of five classes. I got a B in Trusts and Estates which I am more than pleased with for the effort I put forth. Out of the exams I took, it felt like my poorest performance and threw me a bit of a curveball. Interesting to note, and providing a serious insight into law school, is that the T&E exam I took was the largest one I took this semester and the largest class I've been in with a solid 120+ students. The funny thing is that the grades for that class have been up for over a week already and not a single other grade has been posted for me. Graduation is tomorrow for those lucky 3Ls and so their grades have to be done by then and hopefully the rest of our grades won't be far behind.

And just like that....

...only one year remains. Yes, the second year of law school is over already. I took my last final today. Miraculously, I survived the semester. You may have noticed the three month gap between the last post and this one, well a lot happened. First of all, I finished my note. That got a huge monkey off of my back. Then I did something that I highly recommend to no one--plan on getting married during the semester and then have it all fall apart before your eyes. Without all the details, I was two days away from a wedding and it came crashing down. Suddenly, my world was upsided down. I had to drag myself to school. If it weren't for the support of my family and some really great people at school, I would have dropped this semester and possibly law school for good. Fortunately, they convinced me to stick it out. I found out that the school offers some great, free pyschiatric and psychological services as part of our tuition. I'll admit that they played a part in getting me through it too. It wasn't just that I was upset about my life, but I would barely be able to deal with the fact that my marriage didn't happen and then I'd go and sit through a couple hours of talking about divorce mediation. Or, I'd go in and listen about how couples left stuff for each other in their wills. It's done though. Grades are still a little ways out and I'm sure I didn't do much to help my GPA this semester, but at least I didn't drop any classes. The moral of the story is that you should be careful about what extracurricular activities you do during the year.

Another great tip--do some volunteer or unpaid internships during the school year, thanks to that, I have a job for the summer. I'll only get paid if the whole work study thing works out, but at least I have something to say when people ask what I'm doing this summer. Plus, it's another line on the resume!

I'm excited that I only have one year left. It's kinda hard to believe. It doesn't seem like that much time has gone by and I'm really two thirds done! (Actually though, the last two months have seemed like an eternity.) So, life is fairly decent for me and while I don't feel quite the relief I did at the end of first year, there is definitely something special about being where I am at now. Good luck to all of you moving upward and onward... I feel for you.

Have you ever sat so long...

...that it was painful. I have. It's actually becoming a regular occurence on Tuesdays. I am at school from 11:00AM until 8PM and it's not very fun. I have a class, a 2 1/2 hour break, another class, another 2 hour break, and then one more class. I'm just putting this out there for 1Ls to consider when they finally get to pick their own classes. I thought the evening class might be okay for me because it is only once a week, but it is also a rather dry area of the law and so it's hard to decided if the trade off was worth it.

I'm two days away from turning in my "final" draft of my note. I say "final" because it's just one more draft. It could stand to be revised several more times and it's quite possible that I will pursue revising it in the near future. I don't really have any expectations of getting published by my journal, but I feel like I picked a good topic that and that the underlying paper is certainly publishable. I also have strong feelings about the quality of my paper being judged when it is essentially something that I wrote on a few nights before a few deadlines. The topic certainly deserves more respect than it received so far.

We had the Blizzard of 06 this weekend. It was kind of exciting, rarely do you get to see over two feet of snowfall in such a short period of time. Unfortunately, it fell on the weekend and the city's sanitation department is way too effective and had the city passable by the Monday morning commute. It was the first real snow we have had this winter. Now, the next three days are supposed to get up to 50 degrees and melt a lot of what we have. I say a lot because there are some big piles that I don't think even three days of heat will cause to disappear.

Just one more deadline...

and I'll be done with that note. We had to turn in 30 pages yesterday. It was a lot of work to finish off those last 10 pages. I survived though. I still have quite a few footnotes left to add in and I need to play around with the structure, but at least I have 30 pages of "stuff" written that I could turn in if I had no other choice.

We're now a week and a half into the new semester. I've changed classes several times, but all that shuffling is over now that the add/drop period has drawn to a close. I think I got some good classes; I know that, thanks to my sitting in on a class here and there, I dropped the right ones. I have a little concern about Trusts and Estates. Thanks to my 1L professor, we didn't learn a whole lot of property law, so if it gets into that too much, I may sink. I have two ADR classes this semester--trying to mix things up a bit and get a well rounded education and a look at things other than adversarial, litigation side of things. I'm also going to try and do help some people do pro bono bankruptcy filings. That should be interesting and good for the resume to finally have something law related on it.

Meanwhile, I'm a bit stressed. I'm moving this weekend. Or at least I'm trying to move about 35 blocks from here. It's a slow process. I'm thinking about just biting the bullet and paying for a 'man with a van' to come and help me. It's a bit stressful. Add to that the note deadline that was due this week and the final draft deadline pending about 3 weeks away, it's really piling up for me. To make it even more fun, I got to spend a useless 1 1/2 hours of daytime minutes on the phone with Dell. My AC adapter has a short in the cable (perhaps among other problems) and sometimes it won't charge the battery and other times it makes it so my computer shocks me. Obviously, I need a new one. They're only under warranty for a year, so it turns out I have to buy a new one. The guy doesn't tell me that though at first. He tells me he is going to send me a replacement, but that's not the case. Then when he asks me about other problems, I tell him about the crappy CD/DVD player and he blamed it on my discs needing cleaned. So, I gave up and got transferred to 3 other people before anyone processed my order for a new adapter. This is after an hour and a freakin' half! After I got off the phone, I steamed about it and two minutes later called back and canceled my order. I found it cheaper somewhere else on the net and decided that Dell was not getting any more of my money! So, there.

You' know that you had a good vacation...

...if you feel like you didn't get any work done. And that about sums up where I am at right now: two weeks into vacation and not nearly where I need to be in terms of catching up. Oh well, it's been wonderful to be home and spend time with family and friends. I've even done some "catching up" on friendships in person and on the phone so that I'm not so far behind in my social life.

Anyway, part of the joy of law school is waiting for grades. Finals were over almost three weeks ago and not one grade has been posted for me. Guess that's not too bad--why would I want to ruin such a good vacation. I'm supposed to be reading for an upcoming intensive mediation class and working on my note. The reading puts me right to sleep. Not that it is bad, I just think I have become conditioned to fall asleep when I start reading educational materials. Hopefully I'll figure out a way to overcome.

These two weeks have flown by. I have just one more day here at home and I wish I had more. I certainly enjoy it here and I could never be sure if I like it better here or in the city. There are so many tradeoffs. It's important to have a nice break like this. (Actually, it doesn't end immediately--I'm flying back to NYC, spending the night, getting on another jet and going to visit a special someone in Texas for a few days; then the class starts.) I still have several hours of flying to get some of this reading done and I'm pretty sure the Texas flights won't have a movie to distract me.