gwax's rumblings

As the clock ticks over to 6am, it occurs to me that I’m pulling more all-nighters here in law school than I ever did at MIT. I used to pull all-nighters every once in a while at MIT, some­times out of neces­sity and some­times just for the heck of it. All told, I prob­a­bly aver­aged one or two all-nighters for every few months dur­ing my under­grad career. So far in law school, I’m prob­a­bly aver­ag­ing one or two per cou­ple weeks. To com­pen­sate my lack of sleep­ing, I’ve taken up a fairly reg­u­lar nap­ping reg­i­men; Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, from the end of Contracts (10am) until lunch, I usu­ally take a nap in one of the chairs of the law school sub-plaza. It’s prob­a­bly not a good sys­tem but it works well enough and I’ve only got about a month left.

Noticing my ear­lier dis­cus­sion of how apre­hen­sive I was about start­ing law school, I thought that I should weigh in and let you know that school turns out to be really not so bad. The Socratic method is not ter­ri­fy­ing and if you know what’s going on the pro­fes­sors tend to acknowl­edge that and move on to some­one else that isn’t quite so quick. It can be a lit­tle annoy­ing some­times when a pro­fes­sor con­tin­ues talk­ing to three or four stu­dents through an entire class and you can’t get a com­ment in but it’s inter­est­ing to see other people’s views/understandings/opinions get con­fused and drawn into ques­tion. As not bad as the classes and the con­tent turn out to be, the work­load is decid­edly not so pleas­ant; I’m get­ting ~50 – 100 pages of read­ing a night and these law texts are not the clear­est or eas­i­est things to read. The mate­ri­als is inter­est­ing but the sheers quan­tity of con­tent that is being shoved into my brain left me mostly burned out by the end of this week. Of course, a game of golf and such has pretty well cleared my burned-outtedness, so I should be set to get tomorrow’s work done. So yeah, law school really isn’t that bad.

Whilst I had pre­vi­ously found myself totally at ease about going to law school, in the past day or so I have started to develop some very strong appre­hen­sions. Quite frankly, I’m flat out ter­ri­fied right now. I am aware that my fear is sim­ply a fear of the unknown but that pro­vides me lit­tle solace and I am left plod­ding for­ward and hop­ing it turns out to not be that bad. There are really three mat­ters that con­tribute to my fear: grad­ing, par­tic­i­pa­tion and home­work. Grading is done in a man­ner that I am unac­cus­tomed to, namely there’s a final and noth­ing else; my entire grade for each class will be deter­mined by a sin­gle test that I take in three and a half months. Although par­tic­i­pa­tion essen­tially doesn’t con­tribute to my grades, I am not look­ing for­ward to the Socratic method of call­ing out and grilling stu­dents; that said, it may turn out not to be as bad as I cur­rently think. As for home­work, class has not yet begun and I already have about forty pages of read­ing with some writ­ing assign­ments due for each of my classes and if I’m get­ting this much before class begins, I’m a lit­tle con­cerned about how much work I will have later. I’m glad that this fear has only just set in as I’ll get some relief once classes get under­way in two days but I’d cer­tainly pre­fer if the fear wasn’t here to begin with. Anyway, I mostly just wanted to vent and get my appre­hen­sions out of my head but I’ll keep you folks posted on how things turn out as time passes.

After some delib­er­a­tion and what­not, I have decided to attend the University of Minnesota School of Law next year. I’ve been think­ing about this quite a bit since I first got my accep­tance let­ter from them and I’m really look­ing for­ward to this whole law school in the Twin Cities thing. There have, how­ever, been a cou­ple of bumps in the road of my mind already.

The first mini-crisis that I encoun­tered hap­pened when I was writ­ing the address on the enve­lope of my accep­tance reply. Things were unevent­ful until I hit the address zip code, 55455, which hit me like a cosh in the back of my skull. For as long as I can remem­ber hav­ing a zip code, it’s been a 0####: 01742 — Concord, 02543 — Woods Hole, 02139/02141 — Cambridge. I am mov­ing away in a fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent way than I have before; I will be well over a thou­sand miles from any of my home ground.

The sec­ond mini-crisis hit me right after an IRC dis­cus­sion about Magic cards; I know it’s ultra-geeky but that’s what struck me. I am going off to law school and leav­ing the world of engi­neer­ing and sci­ence; this won’t be MIT where, even if they won’t admit it, every­one is a huge geek. I am going to have to find cul­tural con­text that doesn’t rely on Magic cards and com­put­ers; I guess it’s a good thing that every­one plays Halo.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I see these mini-crises as a good sign, not a bad one. Since, change and var­ied expe­ri­ence are cen­tral ele­ments of my desire, being struck by the mag­ni­tude of cer­tain changes means that I’m going in pre­cisely the right direc­tion. Besides, Minnesota is cold, gets tons of snow and gophers are almost as awe­some as monkeys.

I have received another rejec­tion, this time from NYU Law School, which puts me at one for three now. Four more to go and then I’ll make my decision.

Yesterday, I received an “Unfortunately, we are unable to offer you a place in the class.” let­ter from the University of Chicago School of Law. It’s a shame, UChicago was pretty high on my list of places that I want to go. Well, five more admission/rejection let­ters to go, let’s see how things turn out.

I got my first response back from a law school today; I’ve been accepted at the University of Minnesota Law School. Now, I’m sure plenty of you folks will have comic things to say about Minnesota, so I’ve pre­pared a few retorts in advance: I have a ton of fam­ily in Minnesota; I was born in Minnesota; I am one of those peo­ple that likes the cold; the University of Minnesota Law School is ranked 19 in the coun­try by USNews.

Having begun the process of actu­ally doing appli­ca­tion things, I have revised the list of schools to which I am apply­ing. The list, in an arbi­trary order, is as follows:

• University of California, Berkeley
• University of California, Los Angelas
• University of Chicago
• University of Minnesota
• New York University
• Northwestern
• Yale

That is the final­ized list, I will be writ­ing essays and com­plet­ing appli­ca­tions in the next few days.

I scored a 167 on the LSAT, which puts me around the 95^th percentile.

As one of the last things that I have to do this week (in order to grad­u­ate), I have to write a 15+ page paper on the sub­ject of Inorganic and Organometallic Polyers. I know enough about Inorganic and Organometallic Polymers to fill, at most, two or three pages. The only time that I’m going to have to write this paper is the next 28 hours. So as to be able to accom­plish this task, I have obtained the fol­low­ing req­ui­site supplies:

• 1x Ray, N. H. — Inorganic Polymers
• 1x Mark, James E.; et al. — Inorganic Polymers
• 1x Archer, Ronald D. — Inorganic and Organometallic Polymers
• 1x 2 liter bot­tle Mountain Dew
• 1x 23.5 fluid ounce can Jolt Cola
• 1x 23.5 fluid ounce can Jolt Blue
• 4x 6.5 ounce Shur Fine Sausage Pizza
• 1x 17 ounce box Cracklin’ Oat Bran
• 1x 18 ounce con­tainer Duncan Hines Whipped Vanilla Frosting
• 1x 1 gal­lon bot­tle Hood 2% Milk