Jeremy's Weblog

I recently graduated from Harvard Law School. This is my weblog. It tries to be funny. E-mail me if you like it. For an index of what's lurking in the archives, sorted by category, click here.

Friday, April 16, 2004

It's about 4 weeks until my first exam, which is when my Four Week Exam Plan gets started. Here's how it goes:

Day 1: Organize notes. Make sure I'm not missing any. Look under my bed if any are missing. Shake hard drive. Check garbage pail. Ask friends for copies of theirs. Try not to lose them too.
Day 2: Get some outlines off the Internet. Feel productive while downloading lots of stuff I'm never going to read.
Day 3: Sneak into journals office late at night and print outlines for free. Never tell anyone I do this. Oops.
Day 4: Go to bookstore. Look at study guides. Memorize without buying. Go back five minutes later, ashamed of myself, and buy study guides. Feel bad for the rest of the day.
Day 5: Pick a treatise, get it from the library, and pretend to read it cover to cover.
Day 6: Print out every practice exam I can find and will never actually do. Feel productive while stapling them.
Day 7: Condense notes into an outline. Get tired on page 3. Use outline I downloaded instead. Feel productive while going through downloaded outline line by line correcting typos.
Day 8: Catch up on reading for semester.
Day 9: Look for notes I lost since Day 1 when I had them all neatly in a pile.
Day 10: Go to professor's office hours hoping to extract clue about exam questions. Fail miserably, but feel productive for having tried.
Day 11: Restaple stuff.
Day 12: Read another treatise.
Day 13: Do a practice exam. Convince myself that if I had a model answer to look at, mine would be just as good.
Day 14: Try the outline thing again. This time get to page 8. Decide you really want to have a small outline. 50 words or less. Feel productive for making a completely useless 50-word outline.
Day 15: Pretend I don't have an exam in less than two weeks. Read US Weekly, TV Guide, or something else really vapid.
Day 16: Wake up refreshed after a day off. Realize how good that felt. Take another day off.
Day 17: Two practice exams. Compare answers with the dumbest friend I can find. Feel satisfied I'm not as dumb as he is.
Day 18: Make some new outlines. Fail miserably.
Day 19: Read the outlines I downloaded, and the commercial study guides I shamefully purchased. Convince myself I know this stuff.
Day 20: Re-read the outlines. Realize nothing stuck. Bang head against wall.
Day 21: E-mail friends at other law schools for their outlines, just for the heck of it. Print them out and immediately throw them away.
Day 22: Practice exam and interminable session with smart friends where we go over answers. Feel satisfied I'll have a happier life than they will.
Day 23: Lots of sleep. For no particular reason.
Day 24: Catch up on American Idol recaps on the Internet.
Day 25: Final attempt to make useful outline. Sort of helps. Feel productive.
Day 26: Last practice exam.
Day 27: Lots of Vitamin C.
Day 28: Take exam. Cry myself to sleep.