I really enjoyed law school.
Really no aspect of the environment was as terribly stressful as widely assumed (and often insisted upon by grads who like to seem tougher than they are). Not to say there weren't stressful times and manic people competing and stressing all over the place. There were many such and they might have been more or less the norm; I can't tell. Not a joiner to begin with, I was somewhat older than the average student (more or less straight outta undergrad) and somewhat younger than the typical adult learner. Also, I tried to adopt and exude a vibe-opposed-to-competitiveness.
When I describe that characteristic of my personality which is opposition to competition with the sentence "I'm not competitive," more often than not people try to reassure me that, in fact, I have assets sufficient to compete, and that's not what I mean at all. By opposed to competitiveness, I mean that I tried to share: while taking my daily laptop transcript of the lecture and discussion I was able to learn the names of most of the people in my classes, and note when they were absent; many were flabbergasted when I offered them the transcript.
I proofread and marked up (red pen and all) one professor's draft-book-chapters, when they were assigned library-reserve reading for his class, and was hired on the spot as a research assistant, which meagerly-paying position I held for the years of law school.
The finals happened toward the end of every semester or so, as the name implies. The worst were probably those at the end of the first semester, if only because that was about the peak of many students' law school stress, as far as i recall judging, and they weren't so bad.
Except the security: Notes and exams could be done on laptop with certain "secure" software that had to be downloaded and installed and troubleshot and registered and confirmed each semester.
Taking the LSAT, and then enrolling in law school made me the target of an immense amount of slightly specialized junk mail.
Studying for the bar exam, and the exam itself, are supposed to be really stressful too. There are commercial review courses that one is supposed to take. In fact, one is supposed to pay a low low price once during one's first semester for the course three years later and thereby lock in the savings of a couple hundred dollars.
If you don't, the monolithic national bar review company will hire your peers to give you the hard sell several days a week. If you still don't, you will personally be assigned to a student rep who is somehow given extra incentive to recruit you (but, if you're lucky, you'll already have a personal relationship with said assigned student rep, and both escape some of the sales-pressure -- because one who knows you personally might have already heard your opinions of that organization's marketing practices -- and learn that you have been so targeted).
As has been established, I'm contrary. I took a little local mom-and-pop, as it were, Bar review (hello Dan Shemer and company!) for a comparable price and had live lectures (instead of videos) by real people. The owner/director emphasizes relaxation - taking about 15 minutes each class for a guided meditation, which, as you can imagine, confuses many of the ambitious participants). Also, the subject matter and schedule and all were excellent. Of course even with that local, laid-back flava, the recommended schedule still directs something approaching ten hours of study per day (before the final week, which Dan Shemer insists, should be spent doing non-bar-related things), for the uptight student. I really enjoyed that too. And fuck BarBri!
The bar itself was a long test on two days. (some states more)
The room of the Baltimore convention center where we did it was disorientingly vast; there were birds among the rafter struts. The review course, like all courses of their ilk regardless of test or credential, are somewhat about the substantive material, but mostly they're indoctrinations in dealing efficiently with the set of problems. So it's less about linearly reading the question and reasoning out the answer than it is quickly scanning details and eliminating the clearly incorrect answers before actually reading, on the mult. choice, and, for the essays, having practiced and practiced to memorize and produce a basic template for the construction of an answer, and to memorize certain simple expressions of the rule of substantive law for a particular body of law, then just spit out the formula as quickly as the hand can write.
I crashed the night between with a couple friends who live in that city.
The stress comes in remembering your seat number wrong (by one digit), so that, on the day when the results are published on the state bar passage (or whatever) web site -- before the conventionally-mailed notifications of results have been received -- you look up a seat other than your own and think for 24 hours that you have not passed.
The woman at the seat next to mine (I don't really know if I remembered her
number, but I like to think it was hers, rather than whoever was at the next table over) was very kind before the exam, remarking that it was not her first attempt, and wishing me luck. Anyway, I looked up the wrong number. Was somewhat dismayed. Told my local father-proxy, proprietor of local coffee shop, now under different mgt., and my father, and received nice support. And the next day in the mail came the actual seat number and notification that I had in fact passed.
So then commenced the continuing ordeal of being underemployed and lacking direction or benefits. It's not so bad; that so much time can pass so quickly is somewhat ambivalent.
Anyway, now I'm sort of employed, which is more than can be said for most similarly situated people in the region (from what I hear about the industry -- there too, I try not to participate too much in a lot of the collective fretting.)
Work wise, I don't really know how to apply my credential to anything that doesn't ultimately work toward (or otherwise have as an effect) results of which I disapprove. The "first do no harm" principle is tough.
I'm into constitutional law, though not in a practicing way; I've done document review on a bunch of huge financial services, medical or telecom litigations and antitrust cases; I've developed some familiarity with some aspects of the international law of war, and human rights, and the lately prevailing paradigm of bilateral investment treaty arbitration, out of indignation and contrariness over most of the past decade, and, more recently, as a result of collaborating with a colleague who recently moved from the career mezzanine of temporary contract attorneydom to practice in the international commercial arbitration section of some firm with a pair of names.