Wah wah wah.

(Whining Post about law school)

Monday was my first Hah-vahd law exam. And it was a pass-fail. The good thing about pass-fail exams is that the threshold for passing is incredibly low. As described by my professor, we have to actively try to fail in order to fail. (He's the little old guy in the middle.)

The bad thing about pass-fail exams is that failing them is simply not an option, forcing you to drive yourself nuts making sure you don't fail the damn thing while simultaneously trying to motivate yourself to really sink your teeth into material you're acutely aware you don't need to sorry about. Of course I freaked out.

Anyway, busted my tail for solid 3 days over the weekend, arrived in the exam...and I believe I passed it. So that's the good news. We shall see whether or not my cursory glance at the actual question and fact pattern was completely off-track...The main issue, however, is that I put off all my work over the weekend to ensure that I passed this bitch.

The complication is that today I was scheduled to be "on panel" for my corporations class. What that means is that the professor, way ahead of time, schedules certain individuals who will be "on call" for the whole day. (This is him by the way.)
This means that you don't get surprised by randomly getting called on, but also that there is no excuse for not knowing the material. It's your fuckin' day. You knew it was coming. Which means that I had to prepare. In triplicate. So, with a sense of ease at 4:00 p.m., as soon as I got out of the exam, I thought I'd get started on it and just take my time with it...and do some extra background reading in some hornbooks or something (because seriously, I don't know what the fuck is going on in that class half the time. It's filled with stupid mid-career EU bastards who have taught EU corporate law are sitting in my class next to the most brilliant legal mind in India, who are sitting next to the hedge-fund investment bankers and MBAs...who all end up driving the class towards issues and a level of understanding I simply don't have because I'm not a fuckin CEO.) In addiiton, today was day 2 of Mergers and Acquisitions, which for corporate lawyers, is the sexy stuff. The stuff with all the crazy possibilities of hostile takeovers, leveraged buyouts, maneuvering, all-out warfare, discounted cash flows, and the whole gamut of fiduciary duties we've been doing for the past 8 weeks...all crammed into today.

Which is fine. Until I realized at about 8 o'clock that I wasn't going to be done until 10...at which point I realized I wasn't going to be done until midnight...at which point I realized I wasn't going to be done until 2. All said, after freaking out quite a bit, I took my 30 minute walk home at 2 am, 80% done, not entirely sure what I was going to do to be ready by 8:15 in the morning (again, factor in the 30 minute walk, so by 7:45 in the morning.) All said and done, I went to bed at 3:30, planning to get up at 5:45 to finish the rest of the assignment (by that point, reading the material was taking 3 times as long b/c I had gone stupid.) So, I set my cell phone alarm clock for three separate times to be sure I would get up...placed my alarm clock on the bookshelf away from bed to be sure I didn't turn it off unconsciously, and fell asleep 30 minutes later....stupid fuckin coffee.

I woke up at 7. An hour and 15 minutes late. But I felt good! I musta just finished my first rem cycle, thankfully. So I hurriedly read through 30 pages of material and two cases, hoping we wouldn't get to them...drank an enormously strong cup of coffee, and headed off to class.

Now I'm not generally shy about speaking in front of large groups of people. But I am "shy" about being asked a question I don't even understand in front of 100 people in a cavernous classroom...having to turn my microphone on (yes, personal microphones) and sit there in silence because I don't even know what's going on...let alone how to answer his question...even more so on a day when I can't pretend I'm not prepared. This situation is exacerbated by the fact that by all appearances, 95% of the time when the professor calls on somebody...he gets the answer he wants (about 60% of the time when he does that in class, I have no idea what the answer is.) Furthermore, the first time I was on panel...I totally fucked it up. Whenever he asked me a question, I blubbered out some rapid-fire, confused string of words that didn't make any sense...filled with qualifiers like "presumably" and "theoretically" and "realistically" and all of those stupid words you throw in to hedge against being wrong. Terrible.

But today was not that day. Not to say I performed wonderfully. Or that I blew them away. Or that anyone had any idea who was answering the questions. But I was tolerable! I mean. Passable! Nondescript! It was fantastic.


(Actually, to be totally honest, I think I did alright because I got a few questions that I was specifically ready to answer...and one answer that just popped right into my head. Gotta love that.) Oh yeah...and this is just a reward for getting through that: