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.

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.

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.