A friend of mine has already suggested forming a study group for some classes we've got spring semester. Apparently just a panic reaction after an exam she had yesterday that didn't seem to go as well as hoped. Although you never know given the curve. In any event, forming a study group before you've bought the books, before the start of the class is even in sight, before you have any clue... would seem to be planning a bit too far in advance. I actually didn't have any sort of study group at all for any of my classes this semester (and hardly did last year except to go over some practice exams). I didn't make any outlines, I didn't re-read the entire semester's assignments... I mean, I studied -- I did some practice exams, read a 1000-page Con Law treatise (seriously -- and I think it's the best thing you can do for a class where you think you understand a lot of the pieces, but don't see how it all fits together, and want to really get the subject in your head and figure out what all the parts are -- I read Singer's Property treatise last year and found it super-helpful [also helped that Singer was my professor] and for Con Law this year I read Chemerinsky's book... obviously I won't know if it did good until I get my grade, but it felt helpful... much more helpful than making an outline, or reading someone else's outline, or reading a Gilbert's or any of that stuff...), made a short "checklist" of issues for each class, made a list of everything we read and one sentence about them (cases, theory, etc) -- but beyond that I didn't really feel like a whole big outline or a study group would have been all that useful. So that's exam advice from a 2L's perspective. Probably different from what I said last year, a little bit, but not that much I don't think.

I took the bus home to NY today. The "Chinatown bus" -- $10 Boston to New York (cheap!), took about 5 hours, pretty uneventful, and not a Chinese person on it, I don't think. It was pretty much all student-looking people, young working not-wealthy people, and a few middle-aged people who probably just liked the fact it was $10. Two people sitting in front me were talking, apparently they both went to Tufts. One of them looked around -- I guess didn't see anyone performing brain surgery or anything like that -- and says to his friend, "I bet we're the only two educated people on this bus." Thrilling people, I'm sure. I guess no one else dressed up enough for them. The guy across the aisle from me, I could tell from his loud cell phone conversation, is at Harvard Medical School, and hopes he didn't catch the flu from the sick patients he's been around all week. And as he said that, everyone within earshot got a panicked look in their eyes. Although better than if he'd said "Ebola" or something like that.

One more random story -- I passed a sign for a church selling gifts, they'd put up signs all around the building. One of the signs said, "Get your family the gifts they've been dying for." The sign was on the fence next door to the church. On the fence of the cemetery. :)