Scheduling Your Life Around the Bar

It's October.  It has taken me three months just to decompress enough to even think about the bar exams. Yes, really.  I wanted to share my experiences and tactics with you so that any of you out there in internetland who may be graduating law school this year can begin to balance work and studying.

First off, everything everyone tells you about them is true.  Except for the people who tell you they aren't that hard.  Those people are lying.  The ones who tell you it is miserable - believe them.

I know, very cute.  Scare the bejeezus out of people to inspire them to study harder.  That's not the intent.  The fact is that they are incredibly hard, and you will go through various stages of anger, frustration, composure, denial, resentment, calm, acceptance, resignation, and fear throughout your study process. That's normal.  But, this post isn't about managing your emotions while you work and study (I'll cover that in a later blog post). It's about time management.

Prepping

Do not even think about not taking a prep course. That's a deliberate double-negative to emphasize that you should absolutely take a prep course! I don't care which one - just check out the ones you're familiar with and use what's right for you.  I had never taken a prep course for an exam before in my life, but in this case I was not going to leave anything to chance.  The exams are too important to go in blind, without the benefit of advice from people who have seen hundreds of exams in the past. They offer a level of comfort that you are in good hands, and honestly if all they are good for is that level of comfort, it is money well spent in my humble opinion.

The Schedule

The course that I took met 5 days per week, for about 3-4 hours per day.  A group of people sat in a room and watched a video of a lecture that had happened live earlier that day. If that sounds crazy to you, that means you're paying attention.  It was crazy.  The worst part of the experience was having 10 minute breaks at the top of every hour. Let's recap.  I have just commuted an hour and a half to get to work, hustled like heck to get to this class at 6 PM, and there are only 2 or 3 ten minute breaks. That's not enough time to get coffee, let alone a full meal. One twenty or thirty minute break would have made more sense, but that was the way it was structured. Cest la vie.

After a week of that nonsense, I got hip to the fact that the lectures were available online.  So, I went home to watch them at my leisure, while I was able to have a decent meal, and still take my notes.  This is what I would recommend for any person who is still working while studying.  Running around like that 5 days per week without proper fuel isn't just unhealthy, it's counter-productive. You lose your attention span, and nothing in the videos makes sense any longer. I was much more focused and calm when I went home. Now, your mileage may vary, and you may find that going to the lecture hall is the only thing that keeps you going, but for me it wasn't worth suffering for. The trick is to stay disciplined, and watch every video on the day that it is assigned.

Homework
The course that I took had daily (nightly) homework assignments, which ranged from multiple choice tests to full-blown essays. The course actually began in late May.  By the middle of June, I was so far behind in my homework, I realized that I had to give it up.  It simply was not feasible to cover the videos for 4 hours, then do 2 or 3 hours of homework each night and get to work the next day. I even tried cramming all of my homework in on the weekends.  That lasted about a week. There is a full day's worth of homework on Saturdays, plus cumulative review.  In short, do what you can to not have to work while you study for the bar.

I was able to take three solid weeks off just leading up to the bar.  I wish I had been able to take more, but it wasn't in the cards for me, so I did as much as I could for those three weeks.  It was literally day and night studying, although there was the occasional zombie afternoon where I had to stumble away from my books and try to remember how to spell my own name. I realized that I had to come up with a modified study plan that worked for me, because the one offered by the prep course really isn't designed for people who are working.  Not that I'm saying that's a bad thing - they designed the program the way they felt necessary to maximize your chances of passing. Fair enough.  But I really wish that had been in the brochure. Bottom line for you, faithful reader:  if you can't take the full 8 weeks of prep off to study, then you will have to modify your schedule.  I didn't do this right away and got more and more demoralized with each day that I fell behind.  But, I worked it out quickly enough and did what I had to do (well, we will see how that worked out in November!). 

Those are the basics of the prep schedule that I can offer for now.  I'll detail what my days and nights looked like, and how the intensity and schedule ramped up as the exams drew nearer in another post. For now, just start to think about how you can block enough time off of work so that you can study!