Bar Exam Preparation
So you find yourself in an unbelievable situation: You failed the bar exam.
Reality is undeniable. You dust off your tears. It’s time to take action.
You wonder: What’s the next step?
Should you retake your bar prep course? What’s the alternative?
Continue reading “What If You Failed the Bar Exam? Should You Retake a Bar Review Course?”Some bar takers wonder if they should study early for the bar exam (ahead of the traditional 10-week schedule), whether…
While there are benefits to studying early, there are many traps to doing so. There are also benefits to simply waiting (if your neurotic anxiety can handle it) until study season is in full swing before deciding whether or not to study for the bar exam.
But bar prep is personal. You’re the dean of your own studies.
To help you decide when to start studying, let’s discuss all of this—who early bar prep is right for and the best way to study early and effectively—so that you’re making the most of your time and energy.
Continue reading “Early Bar Prep: Should You Study Early for the Bar Exam?”Preparing for the bar exam forces you to cycle through various emotions over weeks and months.
One moment calm, feeling like you’ve done all you could. Panic and anxiety the next moment. Frustration. Utter confusion. Overwhelm. Back to relief. Rinse and repeat.
Your heart is beating uncontrollably, your thoughts are becoming irrational, and your palms are sweaty! 🥵 You’re feeling HOT!
Go from hot ⤵
To cool
When you’re in trouble, breathe and go back to the fundamentals.
Reality can betray the most reasonable of your expectations and daydreams at whim, coloring the past with regrets and the future with despair.
But it can also present us with gifts if you look carefully. Some days you have to look much harder than other days.
If life only gives you lemons, you weren’t looking out for the oranges.
Here are five philosophies you can apply right now to mentally reframe how you feel about the bar exam:
Continue reading “5 Reframes to Power Up Your Mind and Emotions for the Bar Exam Right Now”How often do you see motivationals like this?
I wanted to pass the bar exam. But I’m not into infantilized platitudes.
So instead of preparing for it, I made an image of a bar license card with my name on it using Microsoft Paint. You know, for visualization and manifestation like random people suggested online.
I’m not even kidding. This image file has a “last modified” date of July 2, 2013. Look:
Continue reading “Tired of Bar Prep? Guarantee Motivation to Beat the Bar Exam with These 5 Reminders”You sit still during lectures and try to stay awake. You take notes. You read outlines. You even answer practice questions.
Then nothing works. Has this happened to you?
Back in college, I gave a copy of my cheat sheet for our engineering midterm to a girl. How do you say no to a girl? Answer: You can’t.
And then she got the lowest score in the class.
It had all the equations needed, but she didn’t know how and when those equations applied. She hadn’t seen those rules applied to similar problems. She assumed that just having the rules there would be enough. (Same reason open-book bar exams would change very little.)
It’s like when someone says, “b urself” or “learn to love yourself.” Okay… what’s that mean? Could you explain that a bit more, bro? Any specifics?
Same with your “black letter law”… What does “related” mean in your rule statement? You get a better sense of what that means by looking at examples of how that rule is used until you gain an intuition.
You’d think these rules would be plug and play, but they’re not always. Context matters. Knowing when and how to use them matters.
BTW, she was my gf at the time. Awkward! Oh well, live and learn.
And that’s what I want to talk about—learning.
Continue reading “Stop “Studying” and Start Learning: The Underrated Practice of Practice in Bar Prep”