The past few weeks have been busy ones! I finished my 1L year (one down, two to go!) and got to participate in the beautiful, joyous wedding of one of my closest friends since childhood to a wonderful woman…right in the middle of final exams. But I lived to tell the tale, so let’s do just that.
My first final assignment wasn’t an exam at all, but an oral argument for Legal Practice, up against one of my classmates. I had to play the attorney for a defendant in an employment discrimination case (as you can imagine, I didn’t get to pick my side). I spent a lot of time researching and writing the brief I would “file” with the court, which my oral argument was based on, and I think that really helped me. I get nervous with public speaking and sometimes struggle to maintain eye contact with the audience, but being well-prepared and knowing I’d put together strong legal arguments helped (at least a little) with the anxiety. I gave myself a script, which was a mixed blessing. On balance, I think it was helpful to have what I wanted to say written out and really helped me get back on track after answering questions from the “judge,” but it also meant I was making less eye contact since I looked down at the script. I got good feedback from the adjunct playing the judge, but I won’t know how I did until we get final grades since the professor teaching the class is the one who’s ultimately responsible for the evaluation and final grade. Fingers crossed!
After that, my first final exam was in my beloved labor law. I put a ton of work into preparing for this one, making a detailed outline and spending a good amount of time going through old exams (including an afternoon with an excellent study group). My professor even complimented the work I was putting in when I emailed to ask him a question about the critiques of the reasoning in a recent case decided by the Supreme Court. This is the area I want to practice in, so I really wanted to get a good grade in it to impress potential future employers, and the professor has been so kind to me and such a great mentor. While realistically, I know he wouldn’t stop doing those things if I didn’t ace the class, I really didn’t want to disappoint him by not doing my very best.
That work paid off during the exam. There were three questions and I felt confident that I’d done a good job answering them all. As I texted a couple of friends after walking out of the exam, “I’m afraid to jinx anything by saying this but I honestly think I crushed that exam.” Also, to my amusement, my professor had some fun with the fake names in the “issue spotter” first question: Kirsten Gnome (back to work after a hunting vacation!), Jaydee Hantz, Nat Gates, and Rosemary “Laser” Greene. Not sure that’s a place I’d want to work even without the probable labor law violations…
I had two exams remaining after that one, but first: a wedding! My close friend Chris, who I first met at summer care around when I turned 9 and have bonded with over nerdy interests ever since, was getting married at the beautiful Harkness Memorial State Park, and he’d asked me to be a groomswoman. He and his bride picked Star Wars Day (May 4th, as in May the Fourth be with you) for their ceremony.
On Friday, I headed over to the state park, somewhat frantic because I was running a few minutes late and I was worried I’d delay the start of the rehearsal…only to pull in at 3:05 for a 3 PM start time and find that the bride’s parents, brothers, and the maid of honor were still a half hour away. Whew! Once everyone arrived, we went through the rehearsal painlessly and then headed over to Foxwoods for the rehearsal dinner/bowling outing at High Rollers Luxury Lanes and Sports Lounge. The food was delicious (including cupcakes for dessert that the bride Tess made herself! they were wonderful!) and while we don’t need to discuss my bowling score even with the bumpers, I had a blast hanging out with the other groomspeople and their partners, plus (when he had a minute to spare among all the family) Chris himself. After the festivities, I went to play a little video poker, with no giant winnings to speak of but decidedly better results than bowling, and went to bed in the lovely hotel. (Dad was kind enough to dogsit Molly for the weekend so I wouldn’t have to run back and forth between Meriden and eastern CT!)
The next day, it was time to get ready. I joined the bridal party for hair and makeup, opting for a low-key natural look (Kiss and Makeup did a fabulous job) and a braid with curls at the end, then suited up and went to join the groom’s party for lunch and some time together before heading to the wedding. Chris gifted us gold ties for the wedding (full disclosure: I needed substantial assistance from the best man to tie mine), personalized pocket cigar holders, and a cigar to put in it and enjoy at the ceremony. Then, it was time to board the bus and head to the state park…and, since there was only one bus for both sides of the wedding, also time to blindfold the groom so he wouldn’t see Tess before first-look photos!
Once we arrived at the park, we did photos before the ceremony (thus leaving extra time after to enjoy the reception). I do somewhat wish I’d gotten my suit jacket tailored - I’m between sizes and went up for comfort, but it does look a little baggy in retrospect. Still, I think we clean up pretty well - and if you look closely at the photo below, you’ll see that our flowers are being held in lightsabers! After pics and before the ceremony, Chris shared a wonderful bottle of Scotch with us. Tess’s father bought it for him as an engagement present, and after sampling it to celebrate the engagement, Chris saved the rest to share with all of us right before the ceremony. Classic Chris to think of his friends first and want to share something so lovely with them…and also classic Chris to cover the beautiful bottle in Saran wrap, ridiculous-looking-ness be damned, just to be extra sure none of it would evaporate between engagement and wedding.
(Yes, I went Star Trek instead of Star Wars with the Vulcan salute for the “silly” groomspeople pic. No regrets.)
The ceremony itself was lovely - while there was a bit of a breeze coming in off the water, the weather behaved quite nicely for us and the beach backdrop in the Harkness amphitheater was beautiful. The ceremony was short but heartfelt, with the bride and groom exchanging lovely vows they’d written themselves and planting a tree to symbolize the ongoing growth of their relationship. Plus, instead of the usual ring bearers, the bride’s cousins’ sons got bubble guns to bring down the aisle and shower us in bubbles - so cute!
Then, party time! As befits a Star Wars Day celebration, there were plenty of references - the party favors were Death Star-shaped candles, the bride tossed a stuffed Baby Yoda instead of the traditional bouquet (and aimed it at the bubble gun-wielding kiddos, to their delight), and the specialty cocktails were an Aperol Sith and a Tatooine Sunset made to look like Baby Yoda with double limes on the glass. (I tried my best to capture it, but when I did it was my second reception drink, plus the scotch and beer before, so…)
The Baby Yoda on the table is the one that got tossed!
Not the best photography, but a damn delicious drink. I think I ended up having 3 or 4.
And best of all…after dinner, some Stormtroopers joined the party! They were the 501st CT Garrison, a wonderful group that makes group appearances at various events in full, movie-accurate costumes to raise money for the Make-a-Wish Foundation and other charitable causes. (Chris and Tess regularly go to the Denver group’s annual auction, and the Denver group was kind enough to put them in touch with the CT locals.) They leaned all the way in, taking photos with everyone who wanted to and also joining the dance floor for some good times.
Besides all the Star Wars fun, it was just a joyous party, befitting two of the best people I know. The food was delicious (and plentiful - they took extra care to ensure at no point would anyone go hungry), the music was fun, the company (including Tess’s very large, very loving Italian extended family) was perfect. I had the best day I’ve had in a very, very long time.
Unfortunately, the next day I had to skip the post-wedding brunch and go to work and study for Monday’s 9 AM property exam. I did my best to study, both ahead of time and in spare moments during the wedding weekend and on Sunday. I made a pretty good outline, but while I’d hoped to spend some time practicing with the multiple-choice quizzes my professor had put on HuskyCT, it just didn’t happen. Didn’t help that my plantar fasciitis was rearing its ugly head…or feet?…post-wedding and I was popping Advil and trying my best not to move or walk more than necessary.
The property exam didn’t seem too bad, though. The multiple choice questions felt tough, and that’s probably where having the extra time to practice with the quizzes would have done me some good. The short-answer section felt like my best one - I’d covered the subjects well in the outline and felt confident in my answers. We only had one issue-spotter, and it was a beast - several pages detailing the various issues with a fictitious version of the TikTok creator “Hype House” and asking us to analyze the legal issues. I did my best with it and I think I spotted a lot of the issues, and I think I did a good job of providing solid analysis on the issues I could spot, but given how dense the source material was, I really don’t think I caught everything. (A conversation with a few friends after didn’t help - one mentioned an issue she’d seen that I definitely hadn’t! This is probably why more experienced and wiser law students advise you against talking over exams with other students after.) Not my strongest exam, but I think I did well enough to get a decent grade, and I took some solace in remembering the time a favorite professor in a different subject mentioned that after his own property exam many years ago, he promptly went and bought, then consumed, an entire bottle of bourbon in an attempt to block out the memory.
My last exam was a take-home exam for Constitutional Law, and so I took my time with it. On Tuesday, I spent my time working on the essay portion, which we could do ahead of time while there was a time limit on the rest. It was a complex judicial philosophy topic, but a really interesting one, and I think I did well with it. (Helping my confidence: last semester I got an A in criminal law, which featured a similar type of non-issue spotter philosophical essay prompt on the exam, and my professor told me that while I’d made a few errors on other questions my essay had been the best in the entire class.) I took Wednesday off to rest and then did the rest of the exam Thursday - multiple-choice questions, another long issue spotter, and a short answer question similar to the essay prompt but on a different topic and with a tight word limit. I struggled with the short answer, but that was only 15% of the total points and I think I did well on the other parts. I’ve gotten good feedback on class participation, which is part of my grade, but I didn’t do quite as well on the midterm as I would have liked (read: I got a B on a B+ average curve), so hopefully that evens out and the exam pushes my final grade up. We’ll see!
Now I’m working on the write-on competition to join one of UConn’s law journals. These are journals of legal scholarship, edited and published by 2L and 3L UConn students. We have one general journal, Connecticut Law Review, and three on specialty topics - one for public interest law, one for insurance law, and one for international law. In the competition, we have one week to do practice tasks like we would on the journal - we have to edit some writing and footnotes that have had errors intentionally inserted, and we’re graded on how much of it we catch and correct, and we’re given a packet of materials and have to write a short piece responding to a prompt that cites those materials. Once we submit those, the journals will grade each submission and invite students to join a journal based on which ones we’re interested in and our write-on scores. I’m not sure yet which journal I’m going to rank as my first choice - Law Review would be great to have on a resume, but it would also be more work than the others since they publish much more frequently and I’m already really busy!
I did get some good news, though - while I’m still waiting for my other grades, as professors have until the end of May to submit them, I got back my labor law grade…and it was an A! All that hard work definitely paid off. My professor wrote me a very kind note praising my work on the exam and my deep engagement with the class, offering to write me a letter of recommendation if I need it in the future. He also distributed a memo to the entire class with the best answers to each question (anonymous - we see the answer but not who wrote it), and my answer to one of the questions was chosen as the best one for the memo. I’m so proud and excited, and hoping for good results in my other classes too!