License and Registration: Planning for Year Two
Posted by Aaron on Sep 4, 2007
Unlike the totalitarian control the school has over your schedule during you first year, the second year sees some real progress in the personal freedoms department. But, while progress has been made to lessen the control of the State, it still has far to go before it reaches the free society threshold. Think modern day Russia.
Now, getting away from my undergrad thesis, you are given a lot more control over your registration destiny as you enter the second year. While you still don’t have control over which courses you take, except for your two electives, you do get control over which semester you take them and which professor you take them with. To be honest though, this is the kind of personal choice I could live without. It was kind of nice those first two semesters being given my schedule with a pat on the back and a “go forth and prosper.” In those days, I didn’t have to worry about which classes I should take, or with whom, or during which semester. Besides, I could always complain about my schedule because, after all, it was some “horrible” person in the registrar’s office that did this to me and not my own shortcomings in judgment.
To be honest, the date for class registration snuck up on me like a bear in the woods. I found myself sitting at my desk with a course schedule, calendar, and course descriptions trying to figure out what the expletive I was supposed to be doing. I was lost. Why hadn’t they told me what courses I was required to take? Why hadn’t they given me some advisement on what I should be doing?
Well, in looking back, I realize that it wasn’t a bear tracking an alert hiker in the woods; it was a herd of elephants rampaging towards a headphone donned teenager too consumed by the sound waves vibrating off his ear drums to foresee his imminent trampling. There were lots of sources that had the information I wasn’t looking for. Namely, page 58 of the student handbook, which reads: “A second year regular division student must take the following: Administrative Law, Federal Income Tax, Business Organizations, Evidence, Criminal Procedure, Constitutional Law II, Professional Responsibility and Legal Methods III, and Sales and Leases.”
In my defense, the timing of course registration could have been better. They scheduled it the day after the first years had to turn in the product of two months of research and writing, the Legal Methods II Appellate Brief. Needless to say, a rapidly approaching deadline for an assignment that comprises the vast majority of one’s course grade can become a quite effective pair of headphones capable of drowning out even the most deafening of elephant herds.
I was lucky to have a professor that took it upon herself to offer her services to lost first years who had failed to see the flashing neon signs. My advice would be to find such a professor for your own registration needs. But, once you figure out the gist of things, you still have to formulate a workable schedule.
A lot of people, when making their schedule, would focus on certain professors or on a goal of having a certain day off each week. I did things a little backwards, as is my way with most things. My first criterion was my finals schedule. I took each class I was thinking about taking and mapped its exam date on a calendar. If a certain combination grouped exams too close together, then it was tossed out. My second criterion was the weekly schedule. I didn’t focus on a goal of having Fridays or Mondays off, but whether there was an even distribution of classes throughout the week. I didn’t want to have one day off but then have another day with four classes. If there were any combinations that had a particularly long day, it was tossed. My last criterion was the professor. Professor choice was my last factor because I donÔøΩt really buy into all the hype over this professor is great and this one is horrible. In my experiences, professor ratings come from very unreliable and often biased sources. Anyone who gets an A is going to say that that professor was fair and the class was good, and anyone who gets a C- is going to say the opposite. Besides, with all the professors being of very similar caliber, whatever small differences between them was not enough to compensate for a crappy weekly and finals schedule.
So, after the charting, calculating, and all of the other processes that go into schedule formation, I had a Fall 2007 schedule I was happy with. Since they stagger the times that different groups register, all I had to do was wait until 5:00 pm, log in, and enter in my schedule. Well, when five o’clock came, I logged on, entered in my schedule, pressed enter, and made preparations for a victory dance. Well, it turned out that three of my five classes were full and the best I could do was waitlist. I sat there and looked at the screen feeling utterly helpless and so frustrated that the image of my laptop hurdling out of my third story window was not too far from being a reality. I mean, what was I supposed to do? I had just spent the past two hours trying to figure out a schedule that would work and then this piece of expletive website tells me “better luck next time.”
Well, had it been any other week, I might have sat there for another two hours and worked out another schedule, but this was the last day of a week filled with nights spent writing, re-writing, proofreading, and crying in a corner about a legal methods paper. I was exhausted, frustrated, and I gave up. I just submitted what I had and left the outcome to the waitlist gods.
Actually, as it turns out, that was the best thing I could have done. Apparently, the waitlist for getting into classes is common, and by the next week a spot for me had opened up in every one of my classes. The waitlist gods had smiled upon me, and course registration became an exception to the maxim that quitters never prosper.
Seconds, Please!: Spring Semester
Posted by Aaron on Sep 2, 2007
The second semester starts out much like the first semester. Textbooks? Check. Pens? Check. Trapper Keeper with 3D geometric shapes cover? Check. First Assignments? Check? Anxiety, fear, and the unknown? Uhmm. It seems to be missing.
The second semester is your chance to apply all of the lessons you learned during the first semester to a clean slate. So, everything you would have done differently during the first semester, you actually get to do differently in the second semester. Plus, you’re an old pro by the time the bell for round two rings. You know what to look for in cases. You can better anticipate what a professor is expecting when a question is posed. Also, you have a huge bank of legal concepts, some universal, which you acquired during the first semester. For example, before the first semester, I spent almost an entire weekend working on first assignments, and only an afternoon preparing first assignments for second semester. That isn’t to say that second semester is a breeze. I still had my freak out and want to quit moments just like first semester. It’s just that you are better able to deal with them.
My second semester I took Criminal Law, Constitutional Law I, Property II, Legal Methods II, and Contracts. It is the same amount of credits (15) but with 5 classes, which means one more final exam to be taken.
Criminal Law was probably one of my favorite classes spring semester, which surprised me because I had never really thought of it as an option prior to law school. But with success, comes fondness. As my professor noted, you’re never going to be bored studying Criminal Law. The stuff is “juicy” (his words). I have to agree. Every week was a case that involved somebody getting stabbed, selling drugs, or planning to rob a bank. It’s all great fun until you realize that these things really happened. Somebody really did get stabbed. Somebody really did sell drugs to a ten year-old. Those realizations tend to take the fun out of the reading, but not the interest.
Contract Law was also a good course. I had a very entertaining professor who liked to make jokes, except on the final. Contract Law is all about how a person’s promises become binding upon them. There is a lot of material covered in this class and studying for the final was less than easy. In two days, I felt that I had an impossible amount of information to master.
Constitutional Law I was a little different than other classes. In other classes, you read cases that illustrate a legal concept. It’s not necessarily that the case is groundbreaking or the judge is a legal genius, but that the case illustrates the legal concept well. Thus, the thing you study and remember is the concept and not the author or the case name. Constitutional Law is all about important authors and the important opinions they write for cases. So, in studying for the final, you have to not only memorize the legal concept but the case it was from, the author whose opinion it was, and the names of cases and authors whose opinion differs. Once again, it is a lot of information. Being a history buff, the thing I liked the most was when we would get into the historical context and how the current events of that time shaped opinions of the Court.
In Property Law II, you dig further into the world of property law. We spent a good half of this class covering the real estate contract. During that first half, there was actually some overlap with contracts in that we were covering similar concepts in two different classes. It’s always nice when classes work off of each other. Most of the concepts were completely new to me, though. I have never bought a house and had no idea all the steps that were involved. Learning those steps in Property Law II just reinforces my thought that law school makes you good at life, or at least skeptical of it.
Legal Methods II was the class that provided me with the most freak out moments. In the spring, the assignment for legal methods was writing an appellate brief. The toughest thing about the assignment was the massive amount of cases you have to sort through. I started out with a 2″ binder full of cases, which I had to read and reread and then read again. The second toughest thing about the assignment is the process of extracting what the cases are actually trying to tell you and how that applies to your fact pattern. You end up with a billion ideas that you want to incorporate into your brief, no idea how to organize them, and a word count that makes it inevitable that all but a few of your amazing ideas will be left on the editing room floor. This assignment devoured my spring break and bunch of my weekends. So, don’t let this two credit class fool you because it’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
With the exception of the legal methods assignment, the second semester wasn’t all that action packed. It felt like the whole semester was building towards finals. Like marathon with a sprint at the end, I just kept chugging along the whole time preparing for the next day’s classes, and then Bam! it was off to the races for finals.
Eye of the Storm: Winter Break
Posted by Aaron on Sep 2, 2007
My winter break was atypical. On December 14, 2006, the day after finals were over, I wasn’t at home. I wasn’t sweater laden, sipping hot cocoa, and thumbing through department store catalogs. Nay, I was on a plane headed for 21¬∞18‚Ä≤32‚Ä≥N 157¬∞49‚Ä≤34‚Ä≥W (or Honolulu, Hawaii).
I am lucky enough to have had an adventurous college friend who could do nothing but answer the call of our 50th state. So, my last final ended at 5:00 p.m. and by 7:00 a.m. the next day I was on my way, via Denver, to Hawaii. It was the best idea I have ever had. But this blog entry isn’t going to be about pineapples, SPF, and the challenges of maintaining composure on three squares of airline food. Rather, there is something about being tightly packed into a metal tube for 12 hours that induces reflection, and there was a lot to reflect upon.
While sitting there at 30,000 feet, I thought about all the events of the past semester. I thought about my professors. For the past four months, I had had an almost adversarial relationship with them. In a fit of militarization, I had been arming myself with the knowledge I would need to defend myself. Then, when diplomatic talks ended without a consensus, war broke out in the form of a final exam. “Remember your training, put some angles between you and your pursuers. Evade and survive, and we will bring you home.” – Admiral Reigert (played by Gene Hackman), Behind Enemy Lines (2001). Okay, it wasn’t quite that bad.
In any case, whatever animosity I had towards my professors, for putting me through that ordeal, evaporated the moment my pen formed the last punctuation mark on the last line of my last essay for my last exam. It was the moment when anxiety turned into blissful ignorance. Sitting on the plane, I realized that the first semester isn’t a war, but a crucible. I wasn’t fighting the professors for the upper hand; I was fighting myself and the preconceived limits to my own abilities. That being realized, I felt a sense of gratitude for all of my professors. They had pushed me to study longer and harder, and think more critically than ever before. Better than I was before. “Better,stronger, faster. [They] have the technology.” – Six Million Dollar Man (Opening Narration).
Oh, and Hawaii was good, too.