I’m done with the first semester of law school and almost certainly survived it (withholding 100% certainty until all my grades come in). Let’s chat about how finals went, shall we?
The story, unfortunately, really starts the Sunday before finals, December 10. I’d taken the day before off work to attend a friend’s lovely bridal shower and do some studying, my course outlines were nearly complete, and I was feeling good about life. I figured I’d use my day working at the salon to finish up a couple remaining odds and ends on my contracts outline and start a practice exam question or two, and then I’d have the entire week ahead of me to do more practice exam questions before my contracts final Friday morning.
Except I woke up exhausted and with a burning throat on Sunday. I tried my best to go into work, not wanting to miss out on an entire weekend of pay (in hindsight, a godawful decision I feel really bad about, but fortunately the salon was quiet that day so I couldn’t have exposed many people), but I was shivering with what I would later learn was a fever that topped out at 101.1. I left early and got very little done on outlining - sitting at the reception desk and doing my cleaning and inventory tasks took up all my energy. I ended up leaving early and crawling into bed.
As you may have guessed, I’d come down with COVID-19, the first time I’ve had a confirmed diagnosis of it (I got sick once in 2021 with what I think may have been COVID, but came up negative on multiple home tests and couldn’t get a PCR without forking over a $100 copay). Five days before final exams started. Yikes.
Monday through Thursday, I quarantined myself in my apartment, leaving only to walk Molly and pick up my Paxlovid prescription, and wearing a mask whenever I did leave. Monday was probably the worst of it - my fever was spiking, I had no energy whatsoever, my throat felt like it was on fire, and I was starting to develop a cough as well. I did very little studying on Monday, as you can imagine. I did finish up the last outline bits but couldn’t muster the energy to do anything else.
Fortunately, my fever started to break early Tuesday morning (I was still running a little warm, in the 99-degree range, but no more chills) and my primary care doctor, after a telehealth appointment, agreed I would benefit from Paxlovid and wrote me a prescription. I had a little more energy that day and was able to use it to work through some contracts practice questions and did pretty well on 3 out of the 4 I was able to attempt, though the 4th went…very poorly. I also emailed my professor a question about one of the past exams he’d given us to work with, which he apparently thought was a great question and answered it on HuskyCT, the online platform UConn uses for class materials. So I guess that’s a win?
Wednesday was still a tough day for COVID-19 symptoms, especially fatigue and congestion - especially during the day, before my mom delivered me the good kind of Sudafed that actually works. (Pseudoephedrine is the ingredient in the good Sudafed, but it’s harder to get and not on UberEats or DoorDash because it’s possible to use it to make meth. Phenylephrine is the more readily available alternative, which can’t be used to cook meth but also doesn’t actually work.) I meant to do all of the questions from the fall 2020 exam, but only had the energy for two out of the four.
Something probably ill-advised but delightful happened Wednesday night, though. I usually take a 5 mg THC gummy edible to help me sleep at night, and most of the time that gets me mellow and sleepy but not too high. If I feel like further altering my brain chemistry, two gummies (10 mg) will get me good and stoned. Wednesday night, I took one gummy in the evening and then went about my business, until I took Molly out for her bedtime walk and had the distinct sensation that time had entirely stopped while we were outside.
As it turns out, Paxlovid really intensifies the effects of cannabis. I looked it up and learned later that this is a common enough side effect to get discussed on Reddit and such, but at the time I had no idea. I spent the next hour or so more or less in outer space. Some of it I was glued to one of my dining chairs, delighting in every twist and turn of the Slate article a friend sent about Sam Bankman-Fried’s fortunately ill-fated effort to put one of his buddies in Congress. (A few less-than-coherent texts may have gone to the group chat for that one.) Some of it I was wandering around my apartment, writing absurdist fantasy in my head. Then, I slept for 8 hours and woke up Thursday morning feeling better than I had in a week. I went to my telehealth therapy appointment at 9 AM (probably still lightly stoned, for which I owe my therapist an apology the next time I see her), slept for another couple hours, and felt even better.
After my foolish but effective drug mixing, I spent the day studying. I attended a Zoom review session for contracts, finalized the arrangements for a quarantined exam in a private library carrel, and gave myself a full practice exam from questions pulled from past exams that I hadn’t tried yet, which wasn’t perfect but I did pretty well on. And then I tried not to panic (not helped by deciding that until I was done with the Paxlovid, I was going to eschew any further weed gummies). It was my first law final the next day and my professor literally (co-)wrote the book on doing well at law school exams, and I knew he had high expectations for us. I was shaking with nerves as I got ready for bed that night.
Friday morning, I arrived on campus bright and early for the 9 AM exam, wearing my mask. My symptoms were fading, though I had some lingering congestion. Student Affairs had set up a private space in the library for me where I could take the exam, as opposed to the usual proctored exam rooms with 30+ students. And to my immense relief, the first question in the final centered on the “battle of the forms,” which had been the subject of one of my practice questions the previous day. I did my best to recall where my answer to the practice question hadn’t quite lived up to the best in the class and correct those issues on the final. The second, dealing with midterm modifications to a contract, was also something I’d studied and had shown up on our midterm practice exam. I left feeling happy and confident.
On Saturday, I decided it was the ideal day to take off work and complete my take-home civil procedure exam. (I was originally going to work Saturday and take Sunday off for civil procedure, but management asked me to help with showing an empty suite to a prospective tenant on Sunday, so I switched up that plan.) This one was similar length to the other exams, but we had an 8-hour window to complete it instead of 3 hours and it was open-book and open-note. However, there was a wrinkle: my professor gave us 10 questions and each one had a maximum length of 100 words. This is actually harder than it sounds - you have to get to the point quickly and edit yourself well to get the key legal concepts and applications across with only 100 words. I didn’t feel quite as confident in this one as I did after contracts, but I was happy to have it done.
Sunday I went to work, with some studying at the reception desk, and Monday I devoted entirely to studying and practice questions for torts. Much like the night before contracts, I still felt nervous and shaky the night before the torts exam, but I felt like I had a good grasp on the fundamentals of torts, plus for this exam we would be allowed to use our outlines and other notes. This can be a double-edged sword, of course - one’s time during a law exam is much better spent writing than looking up things in the course, and if you don’t have the concepts down, there simply isn’t time to both review the outline and answer the questions fully. But it can be incredibly useful to have your outline handy if you want to double-check a list of elements/factors courts look at in a particular type of lawsuit or remember the name of a relevant case.
Unfortunately, there was an error on the torts exam that caused quite a bit of anxiety for my classmates and me. Our exam included three fictional fact patterns and 2-4 questions about each, largely examining the various types of torts present in the fact patterns and the strengths and weaknesses of potential cases. In the first, my professor had meant to write one question “Evaluate any claims A could bring against B and the defenses available to B” and the next “Evaluate any claims B could bring against A and the defenses available to A,” but inadvertently used the same text, with names in the same spots, for both questions. The proctor wasn’t sure how to handle it, and in discussions after the exam, we found that people had taken different approaches - some answered the question as if the professor had written the second version, while others treated the questions as identical, as they were written, and said “see my answer to the previous question.” (I’m not mentioning which camp I’m in here, just on the one-in-a-million chance my professor stumbles across this - UConn Law exams are graded blind and I don’t want to compromise the anonymity of the grading process.)
My professor emailed the evening after the exam, apologizing profusely and promising to find a grading solution that was fair to students who had answered either way. I felt terrible for her - she’d been a wonderful professor all semester and it was such an easy mistake to make.
As for the rest of the exam, I largely felt confident. There was one question out of nine (in a different fact pattern than the one with the wayward question) where I wasn’t sure if my answer was focusing on the right things, but otherwise I felt like I understood the material and what she was looking for, and I had dealt with the time pressures well.
My last exam, on Thursday, was criminal law. I’ll admit that my studying wasn’t quite as rigorous for criminal law as it had been for contracts or torts - I was getting tired at this point and didn’t have as much energy to devote to studying. I did, however, spend some quality time with a set of questions a previous TA had prepared and felt pretty good about how I’d done with them.
Thursday morning, I took the exam and felt pretty good about how it had gone. One thing that was a little different was an essay question that was an opportunity to get philosophical - instead of responding to hypothetical cases, we got to pick from one of a handful of prompts asking how we would change the Model Penal Code if we had the chance, if certain things should be legal or illegal, or what we thought about an argument about intent and required mindset and thinking. You can’t really study for that, but it was fun to think a little differently about the issues we’d looked at in class. As for the standard hypotheticals, I’m not sure how I did on the multiple-choice section but feel good about most of my short-answer questions.
And that was it - one semester of law school in the books, five to go! I’ve gotten one grade back, an A- in contracts. Since UConn Law has a required B+ curve for 1L and large classes, I feel pretty good about being above the median, even though there’s still room for improvement. Now to enjoy a couple weeks of winter break (and hopefully not refresh Peoplesoft constantly waiting for other grades) until Negotiation class starts…