Bar Wrap Up

It has taken me a week before I am ready to reflect on the bar exam. I can't say I have done nothing for the last week but close to it. The nine weeks of studying and exam left me pretty exhausted and having moved in the middle of it, I felt like I woke up last Friday in a life I did not recognize. It was only nine weeks, but the bar is all consuming, so I have been a bit disoriented.

So with one weeks retrospect, I guess I can say that it was pretty stressful although I had most of my anxiety dreams about it since it has been over. It happens at least once a day that I start thinking about some topic that was on the bar exam and wondering if I answered it right. I feel like I pretty much still remember almost everything that I knew a week ago, but I am sure that will slowly change.

It was not all bad. I do feel like I learned a lot and there was a certain sense of comradeship with other students that I had not felt in a long time. It didn't have the same feeling as first year classes where we were all graded against each other on a curve, although I know everyone looked around the room and thought to themselves that 1 out of every 4 people will fail and hoped it was someone else.

Speaking of the room, it is hard to imagine exactly what the conditions were like. I don't know how many people took the exam on computers, but there were probably 500 people sitting at their computers in groups of 2 in a single conference room with a proctor at the front on an elevated dias reading us the same instructions for each section of the exam and interrupting out thoughts at 30,10, and 1 minutes to go. I took a picture, but you can see too many people's faces for me to be able to post it.

The bar exam is probably like a lot of other experiences that really cannot be understood until you go through it. It strikes unique anxiety in almost all lawyers no matter how many years stretch between now and when you took it. For a professional organization, the bar association does not really make a good first impression since the first real experience you have with them is the bar exam.

I am glad it is over and I hope I will not have to go through that again, but all that is left for me now is to wait until the results come out in October. In the meantime, I have some more time off, and then I will be interning again at the prosecutor's office until the results come out. As far as this blog goes, I think its purpose as a law school blog has about concluded. I haven't decided whether I will continue blogging, but look for a couple more reflective posts about law school and then I will be wrapping this up.