Packing Prep: Do I Really Need This?

Less than a month to go now! I haven't entirely solidified moving plans yet, but it looks like my brother and I are going to make the drive, and then my parents will fly in to meet up with us. My mom continues to be way over-invested in the sort of bed frame that I buy. I mentioned that I was thinking a daybed might work well in the small bedroom (so that I'd have room for a desk in there too), and now she's told me that she's done daybed "research", whatever that could possibly mean, and that stores x, y, and z have wide selections of them and do I want to go look at them right now? No. I do not.

In other news, this week I've been setting up appointments I've put off for a while, getting some car repair done, and have been contemplating what I really actually absolutely need to bring with me. I'm just taking my own car up, no u-hauls or other supplementary mobile storage units, so room is fairly limited. I started typing out an overly-specific packing list, though I think a better approach may be to figure out the big stuff that's definitely going up with me and that will take up the most room, and then figure out what can fit around these huge, important items. 

As fast as I'm going through books this summer, I know I'm not going to have much time for personal reading once classes get started and shouldn't really keep that many with me. But I still want need their presence. More than almost anything else, having my books with me makes a place feel like home to me. And I know from past experience that if I don't have enough around me, or if my shelves seem a little emptier than they should be, I'm all too eager to go to the used bookstore and fill them. However, I can ship these up, so it's not much of a transportation issue as it is a storage one, since the bedroom I'm moving into is quite small. I'm thinking that I should limit myself to 50ish and hope my new roommates aren't bothered if a new bookshelf appears in the living room. :)

I'm also determined to bring my digital piano up, despite it being big and clunky and it taking up way more than its share of car space. When I stressed out in undergrad, having a piano to noodle around on for a few minutes/hours was one of the best ways to unwind, and I think that'll be doubly important in this upcoming year. Plus, I wouldn't want to deprive my future roomies of my mediocre renditions of songs from the Battlestar Galactica soundtrack. So, that's definitely going, and I'll have to figure out how to pack around that. 

Thankfully, all my other stuff is fairly limited. I didn't accumulate a lot of clothing in college I'd feel bad leaving behind, mostly just student-group t-shirts that I should probably drop off at Goodwill anyway. And I'm not bringing much in the way of linens, since I'm getting a different-sized bed. I am leaving behind my TV and DVDs at my parents' for now, which will probably be a good move; if I need to get my Breaking Bad fix on a bigger screen, I can make some new friends who also share good taste in TV programs. No furniture, aside from a metal desk chair I'm a bit in love with, is coming with me.

I'm really looking forward to shedding a lot of the unnecessary stuff I've accumulated in college and beyond. The trick is going to be keeping everything minimal and organized.

relevant link: Unclutterer

Habits: Cooking

I now have a kitchen gadget that sings to me.

Okay, maybe not sings exactly, but this lovely creature plays "Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star" when it starts making me rice and a different song when it's finished. And I guess more importantly, it cooks stuff really well. I bought this with the hope that it'll make packing tasty, healthy lunches for law school more convenient.

Like fixing my sleep schedule (which is going really well, actually!), cooking on a daily basis is another important habit that I'm trying to ingrain in myself before orientation begins. In college, I didn't do much cooking at all and ate a lot of unhealthy junk from fast food places. It's not that I didn't like healthier food, but I had a lot of classwork and a massively screwed-up sleep schedule that stressed me out and didn't put me in the right mindset to start teaching myself more about cooking. I had really good intentions; I even got a CSA box every week. But school-related activities and my unfamiliarity with how to prepare the stuff I got just led to me feeling guilty when I opened the door to get milk and saw the sad, neglected kohlrabi sitting there.*


I didn't learn to cook growing up, unless you think shoving a slice of cheese between two pieces of toast and calling in "grilled cheese" counts as cooking, which I don't. (It's still good, though.) I could do very basic stuff— follow directions on boxes, scramble eggs, that sort of thing—but I never really got into proper cooking until I was out of college and living with seventeen roommates.

As a member of the co-op, I had to take on five hours (or "lumps" as they were called, since the time for each task could vary a bit) of chores/responsibilities. In the year I was living there, I did dish-washing, bathroom-cleaning, floor-mopping, newsletter-editing, and cooking. Every day, there were two people assigned to cook, a two-lump head chef, and a one-lump cook who basically just chopped stuff. I one-lumped a few nights a week with some of the more experienced co-opers, and I began to get a lot more comfortable with all aspects of cooking, from basic prep to the more creative aspects of putting together a meal.

After living at the co-op, cooking seemed a lot less daunting, but it's still not a daily habit. In law school, I don't expect I'm going to be making myself three home-cooked meals a day, but I'd like to try to make my lunch most days. I got this awesome lunch jar so I can bring stuff that will stay hot or cold. In these last several weeks leading up to orientation, my goal is to cook at least one meal per day that I'm at home. That way, by the time that law school really gets going, I won't have to attempt to work in a new routine on top of all the other stress I'll be under.

On that note, I'm off to make lunch.

*I'm still not entirely sure I know what to do with kohlrabi.

links of interest:

Just Bento - a good resource for packed lunch recipes.
The Cooking Adventures of a Tired Law Student - a recent law grad's cooking blog.
Cooking for Geeks - really fascinating if you're interested in the science behind cooking.

0L Networking: Proceed With Caution

In the months leading up to law school orientation, a lot of 0Ls, myself included, have been connecting with our future classmates online, through TLS threads and/or Class of 2015 Facebook groups. It's nice to be able to talk to people in the same situation and chat about moving/housing/other topics only other 0Ls seem to find fascinating, but there's also some tricky terrain to navigate with this sort of social networking.

If you choose to add future classmates as friends from the Facebook group without meeting/talking to them first, you have some choices to make. Who are you going to friend? Everyone in the group? To me, that seems a little overwhelming, but then that leads to another dilemma: how are you going to determine who would be a good  person to friend?

I've added a few people because their posts indicated we had something more in common than the school we'll be attending together, but quite a few of the people I've added have been friended on a whim because I saw them post on the group or reply to something from another 0L. And, unfortunately, I've very quickly found a reason to regret this second approach. A link I posted recently became the source of a drawn-out argument between a friend of mine and a randomly-added dude from the admitted students group. It was kind of like watching a very-compelling train wreck. When new notifications popped up, I winced and thought oh shit, what is it this time? At the same time, I was eager to see the latest development.

I restrained myself from fully jumping into the argument because I figured it wouldn't be good to start antagonizing future classmates before I even got to Minneapolis, but after watching it all play out, I don't think I'm going to worry too much about this particular one. Especially because, on top of arguing really poorly, I saw he had linked to a Sarah Jessica Parker-Looks-Like-A-Horse joke on his own wall, which is a great litmus test to determine if someone is an unimaginative asshole.

But on the other side of this, I haven't regretted friending anyone else (uh, so far) and even met some cool future classmates out in Real Life after making online contact first. Incidentally, my friend who was the person primarily arguing with randomly-added-dude was someone I also added on Facebook without having met her first, and she's one of my best friends now. That said, I'm looking forward to moving up in August so I can actually get to meet people face-to-face and start friendships in a more natural way than friending them on Facebook and hoping for the best.

Texas Farewell Tour

It's July! I only spent one day at home after the Minneapolis road trip before hopping in my car to take off, solo, to Austin. The seven-hour drive out there isn't so exciting, but it's mostly traffic-less and was in an odd way, pretty relaxing after the last unfamiliar, tension-filled twenty-hour journey with my mom just a couple of days before.

I took off so soon after getting back home in order to make it to some friends' wedding, which was casual and a lot of fun. Several of my former housemates from the cooperative that I lived in for a year showed up, and it was satisfying to catch up on the latest gossip news. The reception was a potluck, which meant lots of tasty food, plus something that I ate that I later determined was a pork rind. I spent a few days at my friend's house, ate delicious food, and actively enjoyed not being in Lubbock.

I'm currently in the land of Texas A&M, visiting another good friend who keeps on feeding me delicious homemade food. We marathoned both seasons of Game of Thrones in three days (Legally! I have HBOgo! So don't sue me!) and have started planning how to celebrate Scalia's future retirement complete with party games like, "Who said it? Scalia or some other random dickbag?" This all stemmed from me reading some particularly ridiculous excerpts of Scalia's dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, which was quoted in Flagrant Conduct, a book by a U of M professor who, after reading this book, I am crossing my fingers that I get for Constitutional Law. (If you'd like to get in on the party planning, here is the pinterest board for it.)

I am popping back to Austin for another couple of days, in order to hit some spots that I missed last week (Barton Springs!), hang out with friends a bit more, and to get some delicious peaches to bring back to my family in the unfortunately-peachless land of West Texas. 

Unrelated to all of this travelling, a friend of mine was recently featured on Above the Law for creating a indiegogo campaign (kind of like kickstarter) in order for family and friends to help contribute to her first semester's tuition. The original article is snarky, but the comments are fucking terrible. I'm not sure if ATL has a comment policy (and am a little too lazy to go looking for it at the moment), but the sheer douchebaggery in the comment thread makes pretty good case for having one.

Habits: Sleep

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?

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?

It's 3 am. Clearly the time to learn about the LSAT and psychometrics.

Here's a confession: I really like the LSAT.

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.

Law School Psychology

I've been working my way through Ward Farnsworth's The Legal Analyst for the last couple of weeks and have been enjoying it a lot. Especially when I got to the section on psychology. I'm a big fan of blogs like You Are Not So Smart that talk about the biases that are inherent in everyday thinking. And I've been very, very slowly making my way through Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, which covers some of the same ground, but much more in-depth. The point being: learning about this stuff is freaking fascinating.

So I was really excited to see a section dedicated to exploring some of the ways these cognitive biases influence how law is practiced. Farnsworth does a great job talking about a few different examples of those biases in the law: anchoring, the endowment effect, hindsight bias, the framing effect, and of particular interest to an incoming law student like myself, self-serving/optimism bias.

So, this last one seems pretty applicable to the discussion of incoming 1Ls like myself. Incoming law students are derided a lot for their misguided optimism about job prospects and how well they'll do while in law school, and there's been a huge wave of websites/articles whose sole purpose is to crush that optimism, trying to get the message across that law school is a bad idea for most people. I think most people set on law school must kind of imagine it like those weird statues in Labyrinth that attempt to dissuade adventurers from their true path. FOOLISH 0LS, RETURN FROM WHENCE YE CAME. ONLY PAIN AWAITS YOU IN LAW SCHOOL. Yeah, whatever, statues. I'm on my way to a fancy legal career.

But what about the students already in law school? Are they better served by realistically evaluating their slim chances at being at the top of the class, or by going in expecting that they'll blow everyone out of the water with their sparkling legal insights? I was talking to my mom the other day, and she told me I wasn't allowed to get anything less than an A while in law school. "Uh, I don't think you understand how law school works," I said. "I'm pretty sure I'd be lucky to get any As, even if I was doing really well." But maybe I'm being too realistic. Wouldn't I be better served going in with the highest expectations of myself?

(Semi-related sidenote: some law schools have adopted alternatives to the letter grading system that appear to have been put into place solely to preserve students' sense of self-worth. See Harvard's grading policy.)

In this article on the relationship between hope, optimism, and law school performance, the author reports that a study that measured hope and optimism at the beginning of 1L year shows that hope has a better correlation with law school GPA than does the LSAT. Whoa. Optimism didn't have that same correlation with GPA, though it did correlate with satisfaction with life. The way the two terms are described in the article is as follows:


"Optimism is the expectation that the future will be good, regardless of how this happens," said Kevin Rand, an assistant professor of psychology at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. "Hope is the expectation about things you have actual control over." 

Okay, so hope having positive expectations of yourself, and optimism is just thinking things are going to work out fine. Got it. That makes sense; you do have to do something to get good results rather than just expecting them. But oddly, this is also in the article:


...but research specific to law school has found that pessimism, or a "healthy skepticism," actually predicted academic success. 


So which is it? Pessimism or hope? Are they mutually exclusive? I'm not really sure how these findings fit together. I'd like to think that I can be hopeful and still exercise healthy skepticism, but "pessimism" seems to imply something more than just skepticism.

related link:

"Except in One Career, Our Brains Seem Built for Optimism." article from the WSJ that brings up the issue of pessimism and law school success.

Pre-Law School Reading

I've heard a lot advice on what you should (and shouldn't) do in your pre-1L summer. I've already decided my top priority is going to be to get settled in Minneapolis, and then to explore the city and relax before I'm sucked into the law school void. But I'm also inclined to do some law-related reading beforehand, not in the sense of trying to actually learn the law or memorize anything, but just get myself more acquainted with some other law-related stuff. My dad's recommendations are On the Nature of the Judicial Process by Benjamin Cardozo and The Bramble Bush by Karl Llewellyn, which are the things he read before going to law school. So I'll start with those and hope they're enticing enough to stick with.

I also have a couple of books that fall into the Overly-Thorough-Handbook-for-Neurotic-0Ls genre, Law School Confidential and 1L Of A Ride: A Well-Traveled Professor's Roadmap to Success in the First Year of Law School.  I had Planet Law School as some point too, but I guess I didn't think too much of it since it was tossed. I've skimmed both of these, but I don't remember much about either of them. I'll probably take the time to revisit both of those once it starts getting closer to September and my law school-related neuroses kick into full gear.

I visited BU back in March for an accepted students day thing, and one of the professors suggested his own book, The Legal Analyst: A Toolkit for Thinking About the Law. I downloaded a copy and am currently about 2/3rds through it now, and it's proving to be interesting (and dense) reading. It's not about specific laws, but what sort of considerations and thought processes are behind certain types of laws and policies. I have no idea how helpful this might be in law school, but I'm enjoying it enough to where it doesn't matter. (Also, it taught me about a type of social dilemma sort of thing I hadn't heard discussed before, the stag hunt. It's worth looking into if you're interested in implications of the prisoner's dilemma and game theory.)

Another book that's high on the to-read list is Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence v. Texas by Dale Carpenter. First of all, this is supposed to be really good. It's also written by a UMN professor and is about an important case that took place in the homeland, so I really have no excuse not to read it.

Outside of those things, I kind of want to revisit some of my favorite books I haven't picked up in a while. I've been saving some of David Foster Wallace's stuff to read, and I definitely need to work some Gaiman in. And then I have a sort of tradition of taking on an enormous novel for summer reading; previous years have been Infinite Jest, 2666, and The Corrections. Maybe I should break with the pomo trend and go for something different. Hmm.

Yep, that's my summer reading plan. And like every summer reading plan I've made, I'll probably get to about two of the books I mentioned.

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. 

Okay, this time i'm going to law school for real.

I've been a 0L for a long time. By that, I mean that I've made plans to start law school in the falls of 2010 and 2011, and in this upcoming fall of 2012. I've basically been a professional almost-law-student, except not the professional part, because that would imply get paid any sort of reasonable amount. So.

Why the hell would I put myself through this? Once is more than enough for the vast majority of applicants. But, judging from how many times I've put myself through this process, I seem to derive an expensive masochistic pleasure from jumping through these hoops multiple times.

Three rounds of law school applications sent out to twenty school in total. Four (!) LSATs taken. Four deposits sent in. Five law schools visited. 

Here's the quick rundown of what's happened in these three years:

My first year of being a 0L (or I could call it my -2L year, I guess), I made the error of waiting to apply to schools until fairly late in the cycle. I got in at a few decent schools (and waitlisted at a bunch of good ones), but lost a chance at getting any money at any of them because they had apparently given all their money away. After thinking about my situation, I decided to wait another year, and approach the process more seriously, getting all my apps out way earlier. 

So, my second year of being a 0L (-1L?), I did it right. I applied to the same basic list of schools, except I applied much earlier. Alas, I was waitlisted at many of the places as I was the previous year, but I got some acceptances and money that I hadn't seen before. Nice! I went and visited a couple of these schools, and felt kind of so-so about my options, even though they were pretty solid academically. For the amount of money I was still going to have to go into debt to attend, I wanted to be really really happy with my choice. And so. I decided to retake the LSAT for the fourth time.

What happened with LSATs 1-3? Well, that's a good question. And it warrants a blog post of its own because it's a bit of a story. So, to skip ahead and leave the tale of my long-drawn-out LSAT-angsting for another day, I did well enough on my fourth LSAT to make my prospects at law schools quite a bit better. I applied to schools, got into some really good ones, though I didn't see much money. After looking at my options, I resolved to attend BU at sticker price, and sent in my deposit, waving a sad goodbye to the first chunk of money I would send off into the law school void.

BUT WAIT. I had applied to UMN (a school I had been waitlisted at previously) last-minute, and received an acceptance packet from them just after sending in my check to BU. In disbelief, I read that I had received a very generous scholarship. Sold, Minnesota.

And so I'm following the money all the way to cold, cold Minneapolis, to an awesome law school where I'm going to graduate without much debt. And I'm really happy with this prospect, and am glad I spent all that time in 0L limbo waiting for the right option. At least I hope it's the right option. We'll see.