LSAT Prep

LSAT Prep

                I had signed up for an LSAT prep course, administered by Kaplan.  I had been telling people that I would apply for law school in the fall of 2008 for a fall 2009 enrollment.  I had talked to people about recommendations.  I had bought the Kaplan LSAT test prep book in March.  I had taken two tests.  I had originally signed up for the June 16, 2008 test date, but found a week or two before that I was not appropriately prepared, and changed my date to October 4, 2008.  On the two tests I believed I scored 147 and 150.  My friend Mike, who will be finished with law school in a few months, told me that I should take a Kaplan course if I didn’t score 160 or above on the practice tests.  Well, I signed up for the class, and it was beginning in early August 2008. 

                I had been working for M.L. Stern through my employer in Los Angeles, Accountemps, since July 14.  There was very little work to be done in my full-time eight-hour capacities.  This left me with an incredible amount of time to research law school (note that I was not researching specific schools, but the application process in general).  I had begun reading personal statements and started working on my own.  I stopped myself at doing test prep or writing at my workstation—I would only read on the internet.  But I signed up for that Kaplan course—and one of my attendant anxieties was the location.  I signed up for the UCLA location over the Downtown location—even though my home was closer to Downtown.  I just thought hanging out in Westwood would be more fun.  Plus the schedule was more flexible at UCLA, because half of the classes were on Saturday morning, which was better for my work sanity.

                A few days before my first Kaplan class, I decided I had to take my third and final practice LSAT.  I started around 5:00 in the afternoon, setting aside three hours for my time.  I couldn’t keep up at a standard pace to finish all the questions.  The first section in that particular practice test were the analytical reasoning logic games.   I had forgotten all of the tactics I had learned in the book to attack these problems and a wave of anxiety crushed me as I figured I got about zero of them right on that section.  By the time I moved into reading comprehension, on the next section, I was totally demoralized, worrying about how I would find the time to get dinner, worrying about how expensive gas was, worrying about working on my personal statement and my applications while doing this incredibly intensive prep course, worrying about paying for law school application fees when I barely had enough money to live on every month, after the rent, the cable bill, the cell phone bill, a few hours at the laundromat every two weeks, and food, at which point I had figured that I had $20 to live on every day after all of my required monthly expenses—and that $20 had to include gas allowances, car insurance allowances (another $100 a month plus to allocate, if I had been considerate of that).  After I had made these calculations I decided I could no longer afford to smoke prescription weed—for anxiety—which came to roughly $240 a month, quite a heavy expense to carry.  These thoughts rushed through my mind as I tried to focus on the LSAT test questions and in the middle of the second section I threw my arms in the air and gave up and smoked a bowl—which would be one of my last ones—and thought about how much of a failure I had become.

                The next day I called my Mom and told her I thought I wanted to go home.  I talked to my little sister Emma and told her that I was thinking about coming home and she was excited, as was my older sister Lindsay.  I talked to my Dad after and told him that I wanted to cancel the Kaplan course and cancel my LSAT registration and put it off for another year—even though I was already insecure about my prospective age going in to start law school.  He was remarkably sensitive and told me it was fine, just to refund him the money that he had sent me in order to pay for the course—some $1,300.  Later I found out I had to pay a $200 lease termination fee to my apartment management company and he was generous enough to pay for this as well.  Three weeks later, on August 27, 2008, a year to the date that my brother had been stabbed, a year to the date that I had been making our final preparations for our trip to depart from New York, I left Los Angeles and proceeded northeast.  I would stop in Boulder for a few days as a midway rest point, and I would be in Chicago the night Sarah Palin introduced herself to the world at the Republican National Convention.