My Relationship with the LSAT: It's Complicated

I think about the LSAT a lot. It's the basis for my current job, so I guess it's unavoidable. It's kind of like I've been in a weird long-term relationship with it for the past four years, one that started when I took a free practice test on a whim my sophomore year of college.

(cue flashback sound effect)

I did really well on that test for taking it cold, and it was gratifying. I think most people tend to gravitate towards things they do well at, and I'm certainly no exception. The seed was planted. Maybe law school is for me. Okay, maybe it happened before that, in my freshman year of college, when I started listening to LSAT Logic in Everyday Life. If I take that as my first real LSAT-training, I've been thinking about the LSAT since 2006. Six years of LSAT stuff rattling in my head. Dear lord.

I took the test for real after my junior year of college, and scored well. Even so, I figured I had nothing to lose by retaking, so I did the following October. I scored a couple of points worse, which made me sad, and also kind of pissed off at the test. I hadn't put in any extra work for that retake, so I'm not sure what I expected. 

After one unsatisfactory round of law school applications (see previous post), it was time for LSAT #3. I studied my ass off. I put the work in. You could have put together a (really, really dull) Rockyesque montage of me going into various coffee shops and spending several hours of quality time with prep books.

And then I spent almost the entire night before freaking out, unable to sleep. Well done, self. Test #3 for me was an Oct. test too, so I had to be super early. Which, even if I had been on a normal person sleep schedule at the time, would not have been ideal. Sleep-deprived and with way too much caffeine in my system, i did a repeat performance of LSAT #2. Oddly enough, I remember my dinner after receiving my Sad LSAT News. I was eating broccoli, and it seemed like the saddest broccoli in the world.

I sent off another round of law school apps, this time, very early in the cycle. Again, not the results I hoped for.

For all the hard work I had put into the test, I wanted to get something out of it. So, I was back at the coffee shops for the next several months. And on LSAT #4, the stars aligned, an angel smiled down on me, and I got enough sleep the night before to not screw myself over yet again. After a month of vacillating between believing I got a perfect score and believing I messed up horribly (and checking TLS, where people spent their time trying to talk about the test without talking about the test), I got my score back and was definitely pleased. I tried to communicate to some of my roommates how a four-point increase was totally worth stressing out about the test for several months, but I think some of my joy was lost on them. 

If I consider myself to be 24 (tacking a few month on), I will have spent 1/6 of my life (or a 1/4 of it, if you take into account the podcast-listening) doing some sort of LSAT-related thing. I haven't decided quite how I feel about that yet. But I'm definitely looking forward to finishing up my current round of classes I'm teaching for this June test, so I can break up with the LSAT (or at the very least, take a much needed break) and move on to properly stressing out about my upcoming 1L year.