There are sixty-three days left before law school orientation starts, a month and handful of days until I move to Minneapolis, and I have some really important stuff to take care of. I, of course, have to deal with all the forms and fees and everything that goes along with matriculating into law school, but I have some less-official but equally-important business to attend to: changing old habits and cultivating new ones.
Top on my list of priorities is to get my sleeping habits in line. I tend to be a night owl, but staying up until two or three (or five or six) probably won't be the ideal schedule for law school. And trying to start waking up at seven in the morning after months of going to bed around that time seems like it would just make getting a successful start in law school that much harder. The recent trip to Minneapolis actually forced me to wake up at a normal-person time (we had to start driving at 8-9am to get a full day of driving in), so I'm already on a much better cycle than I was a few weeks previous. Still, with a couple of months ahead of me and all that time to potentially screw up this great sleep schedule I have going, I'm a little worried. Right now, I'm staying with some friends who have 9-5 jobs and are up and about in the mornings, but soon I'll be left to my own devices. I need to create some sort of plan to keep this up.
I've experimented in the past with various ways to wake myself up the morning, but approaching my schedule that way may have been a little misguided. No matter what wonderful intentions I have the night before, no matter how many individual alarms I set, my brain in the morning never has my long-term best interests in mind. I'm frustratingly good at stumbling around in the morning, turning off multiple alarms without really waking up. But all of this comes back to being able to get to sleep on time at night. Even when I am on a normal-ish sleep schedule as I am now, my bed time tends to creep later and later, and I think I'm going to have to put some strict measures in place to stop that happening in law school. The first (and probably most important) of those being: no computer in bed. The bed is for sleeping, not drowsy Pinterest or Tumblr-browsing.
Also important, and this kind of goes into another post I intend on writing, is exercise. I'm not planning to start triathlon-training, but I want to set aside time for regular physical activity, if only to break up the monotony of sitting and reading all day. There's been some recent research that indicates exercise and sleep quality are linked (though there are some interesting responses to that claim too), so it's possible that it might contribute to feeling better in the mornings. I haven't been very active since had reconstructive ACL surgery a few years back, but this lull before the 1L storm is probably the best time to start up again. More on this later.
Somewhat-related link:
Above the Law - You Guys Aren't Getting Enough Sleep, Are You?
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Thursday, June 21, 2012
Minneapolis Trip 3: The Hunt for Housing
Since starting undergrad in 2006, I've moved ten times. Far too much. Into dorms, into subleased houses, into apartments, into a co-op with seventeen roommates, and most recently, back to my parents' house while I'm working to figure out Minneapolis plans. I've had awesome roommates, crappy roommates (thankfully not too many), a seemingly-absent roommate (who still managed to leave crumbs strewn throughout the apartment on a regular basis), and no roommates. I'm pretty adaptable to my surroundings.
Moving up to Minneapolis is an entirely different creature, though. I'm fairly unfamiliar with the city (driving around for four days has only helped a little), and I'm just a little terrified about what the winters might entail. I had initially planned on choosing a place online through an apartment-finding website, but I was pretty wary about leasing a place sight unseen. That was really the impetus for the trip: find a non-scary, nice-ish place to live that I can get to the law school from.
This is harder than you would expect.
I had actually found a nice-looking apartment in a good location off of Craigslist and met up with my potential roommate on the night I arrived at the city. After seeing the one place, I was ready to sign a lease, but she had set up appointments for people to see the apartment through the next ten days. I came away from it second-guessing myself, as if I were a job applicant not really sure how I did at my interview. How did I compare to other applicants? Should I have dressed better? Was my answer to the tough "what sort of animal would you be?" question the right one? (I said I'd be a red panda). After that, I lined up a bunch of 1 bedroom and studio apartments, and most of those were just a tad sketchy and very much overpriced for what they were. I looked some apartments right across from the law school, but the location was really the only good thing about them.
After lots of gross apartments, I did find a really nice place a little further away from the law school but on an express bus route that drops off right outside it. I'm going to have roommates who seem like they'll be awesome to live with, plus it's a lot less expensive and much nicer than anywhere else I saw. And a big plus: garage parking! The neighborhood is pretty quiet, but it has some awesome stuff (bakery, coffee shop, a couple of restaurants, and an indoor tennis center) and is close to the trendy Uptown area. My compulsive Craigslist-scouring totally paid off.
One thing I wonder about it the mental separation from the law school. Right now, I like the idea of leaving law school stuff at law school, and not bringing a lot of work home. But from everything I've heard, I'm not sure that's going to be feasible. In my head, I could go to class and do work there from 8am to 5 or 6 at night, and then come home and relax. I think it would be good for my mental health, but I am probably being overly optimistic about the workload.
One really great thing about living at my parents' place now is that I essentially have free, long-term storage. I won't bring furniture (hurrah for the omnipresent Ikea) and can really pare down the stuff that I do choose to bring without having to go through the process of throwing away things I don't really need but don't want to get rid of for sentimental reasons.
Still, the excitement I feel about getting to start over, stuff-wise, is mitigated by knowing I'm going to be dealing with my helicopter mom, who thinks because she's helping me out with living expenses, she has a vested interest in the style of bed frame that I buy. She said this, almost word-for-word. I am not exaggerating at all. I know I'm incredibly lucky to come from a family giving me so much support, but seriously?
Moving up to Minneapolis is an entirely different creature, though. I'm fairly unfamiliar with the city (driving around for four days has only helped a little), and I'm just a little terrified about what the winters might entail. I had initially planned on choosing a place online through an apartment-finding website, but I was pretty wary about leasing a place sight unseen. That was really the impetus for the trip: find a non-scary, nice-ish place to live that I can get to the law school from.
This is harder than you would expect.
I had actually found a nice-looking apartment in a good location off of Craigslist and met up with my potential roommate on the night I arrived at the city. After seeing the one place, I was ready to sign a lease, but she had set up appointments for people to see the apartment through the next ten days. I came away from it second-guessing myself, as if I were a job applicant not really sure how I did at my interview. How did I compare to other applicants? Should I have dressed better? Was my answer to the tough "what sort of animal would you be?" question the right one? (I said I'd be a red panda). After that, I lined up a bunch of 1 bedroom and studio apartments, and most of those were just a tad sketchy and very much overpriced for what they were. I looked some apartments right across from the law school, but the location was really the only good thing about them.
After lots of gross apartments, I did find a really nice place a little further away from the law school but on an express bus route that drops off right outside it. I'm going to have roommates who seem like they'll be awesome to live with, plus it's a lot less expensive and much nicer than anywhere else I saw. And a big plus: garage parking! The neighborhood is pretty quiet, but it has some awesome stuff (bakery, coffee shop, a couple of restaurants, and an indoor tennis center) and is close to the trendy Uptown area. My compulsive Craigslist-scouring totally paid off.
One thing I wonder about it the mental separation from the law school. Right now, I like the idea of leaving law school stuff at law school, and not bringing a lot of work home. But from everything I've heard, I'm not sure that's going to be feasible. In my head, I could go to class and do work there from 8am to 5 or 6 at night, and then come home and relax. I think it would be good for my mental health, but I am probably being overly optimistic about the workload.
One really great thing about living at my parents' place now is that I essentially have free, long-term storage. I won't bring furniture (hurrah for the omnipresent Ikea) and can really pare down the stuff that I do choose to bring without having to go through the process of throwing away things I don't really need but don't want to get rid of for sentimental reasons.
Still, the excitement I feel about getting to start over, stuff-wise, is mitigated by knowing I'm going to be dealing with my helicopter mom, who thinks because she's helping me out with living expenses, she has a vested interest in the style of bed frame that I buy. She said this, almost word-for-word. I am not exaggerating at all. I know I'm incredibly lucky to come from a family giving me so much support, but seriously?
Minneapolis Roadtrip 2: The "What if?" Game
I AM SO GLAD TO BE BACK IN TEXAS. I never thought I would say (or rather, type) that so emphatically, but oh man was that driving rough. I actually tend to do better on long rides by myself, weirdly enough, since I can listen to podcasts constantly or just play music I enjoy the whole way. But going up to Minneapolis and back with my mom, there was a lot of this sort of stuff going on:
"Haven't we listened to this song several times before?" (Yes, we were driving for ~40 hours total on this trip. Some songs are going to repeat.)
"[KD], I think you need to highlight your hair." (...)
"Can we listen to another podcast that doesn't talk about monkey AIDS?" (No, I'm genuinely interested in learning about simian immunodeficiency viruses.)
The best part, and I mean this not sincerely at all, is when my mom played the "What if?" game. Let me explain the rules of one of my mother's favorite pastimes.
1. Pick something that will NEVER happen, or that didn't happen. Example: Going to Harvard, a school that I did not apply to for a number of reasons. (Alternate examples of scenarios: me getting a degree in Accounting. Doing better in high school calculus classes. Winning a tennis match that I lost.)
2. Try to determine what could have been done to achieve that outcome. Example: Doing better in certain college classes I slacked in to boost my GPA.
3. Inform the person in question how much better this scenario would be than their current situation.
3. Express disbelief/disappointment that I didn't take those actions. Example: "I just don't understand why you didn't get better grades!" (Take as long as you possibly can on this step.)
4. Ignore all signs that the process is not helping anyone and is just causing irritation in the person you're berating.
5. Repeat with a different scenario. Or the same scenario, phrased in a different way.
My inclination is to not dwell on the past very much. If something happened, if I got a bad grade or made a mistake or lost a tennis match, I can acknowledge it, deal with it constructively, and move on without much hand-wringing. I like to think that it's one of my better personality traits. But being isolated with someone who can never let anything go, even though this person is my mother and I love her, is awful and stressful.
That said, those moments happened less that I expected on this trip, considering how long it lasted. I would even say that most of the trip was pretty pleasant, despite several games of "What if?"
There's a lot to report about the trip, so I think it'll be better to split this into a few entries over the next couple of days for the sake of organization. Next up: apartment-hunting adventures.
"Haven't we listened to this song several times before?" (Yes, we were driving for ~40 hours total on this trip. Some songs are going to repeat.)
"[KD], I think you need to highlight your hair." (...)
"Can we listen to another podcast that doesn't talk about monkey AIDS?" (No, I'm genuinely interested in learning about simian immunodeficiency viruses.)
The best part, and I mean this not sincerely at all, is when my mom played the "What if?" game. Let me explain the rules of one of my mother's favorite pastimes.
1. Pick something that will NEVER happen, or that didn't happen. Example: Going to Harvard, a school that I did not apply to for a number of reasons. (Alternate examples of scenarios: me getting a degree in Accounting. Doing better in high school calculus classes. Winning a tennis match that I lost.)
2. Try to determine what could have been done to achieve that outcome. Example: Doing better in certain college classes I slacked in to boost my GPA.
3. Inform the person in question how much better this scenario would be than their current situation.
3. Express disbelief/disappointment that I didn't take those actions. Example: "I just don't understand why you didn't get better grades!" (Take as long as you possibly can on this step.)
4. Ignore all signs that the process is not helping anyone and is just causing irritation in the person you're berating.
5. Repeat with a different scenario. Or the same scenario, phrased in a different way.
My inclination is to not dwell on the past very much. If something happened, if I got a bad grade or made a mistake or lost a tennis match, I can acknowledge it, deal with it constructively, and move on without much hand-wringing. I like to think that it's one of my better personality traits. But being isolated with someone who can never let anything go, even though this person is my mother and I love her, is awful and stressful.
That said, those moments happened less that I expected on this trip, considering how long it lasted. I would even say that most of the trip was pretty pleasant, despite several games of "What if?"
There's a lot to report about the trip, so I think it'll be better to split this into a few entries over the next couple of days for the sake of organization. Next up: apartment-hunting adventures.
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
Minneapolis Road Trip 1
Tomorrow morning at eight, I'm headed up to Minneapolis with my mom for apartment hunting/general sightseeing adventures. Hopefully that will go well; I think the most difficult thing will be to craft a playlist that both of us enjoy, or at least, both of us can tolerate. I think my best bet may be to stock up on podcasts rather than music. I always think I've found a relatively safe piece of music, and somehow it still manages to get on my mom's nerves. Example: Feist's 1234. It might be overplayed, but it's about as inoffensive as a song can get. Reaction from my mother: "UGH, WHAT IS THIS? THIS IS HORRIBLE."
The more-than-halfway-point for us is Topeka, and then the next day we'll get into Minneapolis and I will get the first glimpse of what non-Texan life will be like. I just hope the drive up is relatively free of music-related drama. Pictures to follow! I hear that the drive isn't exactly, uh, scenic or anything, but I'll still get to see some states I haven't been to yet.
In other news, I finished up teaching my last LSAT class last week.It was kind of strange to teach a class full of people that were so close to my age, but I really enjoyed it after that initial strangeness wore off. I've also gotten a lot better at public speaking since my first class back in October, which I think will be a big plus for law school. I definitely didn't start out with very much confidence; I remember the first class pretty vividly because it was also the day a gigantic wall of dirt (technically called a haboob) descended upon Lubbock. People were using the descriptor "apocalyptic" a lot that day. So, I was already nervous, and then my car was enveloped in dirt, and I wondered if I had made a serious error in judgement by not seeking indoor shelter. I spent about half an hour in my car, alternatively tweeting, checking websites to determine whether or not a tornado was going to carry me to my death, and attempting to get in touch with my boss in Dallas, who had no idea about what was going on, but whom I'm pretty sure thought I was grossly exaggerating the severity of the dust storm. I managed to get to class after the worst of the storm had blown over, and started off the whole thing rushed, nervous, and with dirt in my teeth. Fun.
This teaching job ended really well, though, and I'm really happy I stuck with it even when I doubted my abilities in the beginning. And it definitely was ten million times better than my other post-college gig, my baristaship at a well-known but now defunct bookstore. But really, anything is better than getting a stern talking to for not selling enough membership cards (which a couple of months later would have been useless anyway).
So, I'm sad to bid goodbye to my LSAT-teaching job, but I'm also happy at the prospect of finally getting rid of the massive prep books and having some free bookshelf room again. Well, come to think of it, that space is spoken for already. That's where my new massive books for law school will go.
The more-than-halfway-point for us is Topeka, and then the next day we'll get into Minneapolis and I will get the first glimpse of what non-Texan life will be like. I just hope the drive up is relatively free of music-related drama. Pictures to follow! I hear that the drive isn't exactly, uh, scenic or anything, but I'll still get to see some states I haven't been to yet.
In other news, I finished up teaching my last LSAT class last week.It was kind of strange to teach a class full of people that were so close to my age, but I really enjoyed it after that initial strangeness wore off. I've also gotten a lot better at public speaking since my first class back in October, which I think will be a big plus for law school. I definitely didn't start out with very much confidence; I remember the first class pretty vividly because it was also the day a gigantic wall of dirt (technically called a haboob) descended upon Lubbock. People were using the descriptor "apocalyptic" a lot that day. So, I was already nervous, and then my car was enveloped in dirt, and I wondered if I had made a serious error in judgement by not seeking indoor shelter. I spent about half an hour in my car, alternatively tweeting, checking websites to determine whether or not a tornado was going to carry me to my death, and attempting to get in touch with my boss in Dallas, who had no idea about what was going on, but whom I'm pretty sure thought I was grossly exaggerating the severity of the dust storm. I managed to get to class after the worst of the storm had blown over, and started off the whole thing rushed, nervous, and with dirt in my teeth. Fun.
This teaching job ended really well, though, and I'm really happy I stuck with it even when I doubted my abilities in the beginning. And it definitely was ten million times better than my other post-college gig, my baristaship at a well-known but now defunct bookstore. But really, anything is better than getting a stern talking to for not selling enough membership cards (which a couple of months later would have been useless anyway).
So, I'm sad to bid goodbye to my LSAT-teaching job, but I'm also happy at the prospect of finally getting rid of the massive prep books and having some free bookshelf room again. Well, come to think of it, that space is spoken for already. That's where my new massive books for law school will go.
Thursday, June 7, 2012
It's 3 am. Clearly the time to learn about the LSAT and psychometrics.
Here's a confession: I really like the LSAT.
As interesting as I find this, I'm going to have to take care that I don't become the person who still talks about the LSAT in law school.
Sidenote: isn't psychometrician a cool-sounding word? If the whole law school thing doesn't work out, I might have to pursue that line of work solely for the awesome job title.
And it's not just because I did pretty well on it or because I get money to teach it now, though those definitely don't hurt. I think it's a pretty cool test that not only does a good job predicting law school success (compared to other standardized tests, at least), but also is a test that requires you to develop logical reasoning skills that are good to have in the outside world. But as a side effect, you start to become really annoying to your friends and family because you start using the word "assumption" in your conversations 500% more than any normal person would. At one point, I even started to evangelize for the test, in a way, by challenging non-LSATing friends to do some logic games with me. Yeah, I was that person. (But seriously, logic games are fun puzzles when you don't have your future riding on them.)
Despite that first paragraph, this isn't meant to be a love letter. I started writing this because I came across a really interesting video of a UVA professor talking about the psychometrics of the LSAT, the score gap between black and white people, and how law schools actually use LSATs in admissions decisions and beyond. And here that video is, if you're interested in watching all forty-two glorious minutes of it:
As interesting as I find this, I'm going to have to take care that I don't become the person who still talks about the LSAT in law school.
Sidenote: isn't psychometrician a cool-sounding word? If the whole law school thing doesn't work out, I might have to pursue that line of work solely for the awesome job title.
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