Bar Exam

Other things have happened this summer. For one, I took the bar exam. After about two months of studying, on July 29 and 30, I sat for the bar. I took a bar prep class, Barbri, which nearly every other recent law school graduate takes to aid in studying. Barbri more or less “reteaches” law school in about ten weeks. The bar exam tests students on about 20 different areas of law, including constitutional law, criminal law, wills, secured transactions, and commercial paper. Many of those subjects, I’d never studied in school, so while some days of Barbri were review, many were my first exposure to the substantive area of law.

So, I took bar prep classes everyday from 9 until 12:30 or so (some Saturdays, some full days), then studied outside of classes for 6 hours a day for the first 6 weeks, about 8 the next two weeks, and 10 – 12 for the last two weeks building up to the bar exam. It was incredibly mentally exhausting, but I was in good company. Several thousand other students across the country were readying themselves for the same two-day (in some jurisdictions, three-day) exam.

The night before the exam, I knocked off early, and Catherine and I headed downtown to her sister’s apartment to crash for the next two days. She lived about 5 blocks west of my testing site, so instead of depending on a bus and a train to take me back and forth everyday, we decided to swap apartments for the nights of the bar exam. It worked out great, because we also got hour-long breaks for lunch, and I was able to come “home” to get away from the hordes of freaked out test takers.

I won’t comment on the actual test – we don’t find out our passage results for another 4 weeks or so now. Only, it was pretty much everything they prepare you for, both on paper and emotionally/psychologically. Hopefully, I only have to do that once.