Situational Blogging

So I’m sitting in the room we have our largest class in (next to two smart and snarky ladies) and the its between classes and they left the microphones on in the room. So one guy is talking and either he doesn’t realize or doesn’t care that he’s being picked up by the microphone and he’s talking and I can hear it clear as day…. and he just swore over the system.

Ah law school. When I kill time I blog.

Musings and the threat of Blogging

Does this automatically cross post at The Girls? Weird. Well anyhow I took a nap all evening so I’m up most of the night whee, start the day at 2am!. Ahem.

So did you know the first life lesson they gave us in Law School? The first that didn’t have to do with actually studying and so forth? Facebook. Either ditch it, or scrub it clean because if you don’t think firms look at sites like Facebook or MySpace then you are living in a dream world. Take the Armando Saga for instance. Aramando was a popular front page poster at DailyKos, and if you click on the Armando link you’ll go to Aramando’s goodbye post. In his own words a right wing site supported a campaign by one of the DKos commentors (the troll in his post) to find out his actual name. As a result, Armando’s job as an attorney (that’s no secret) was affected. Who is Armando? What does he do? What does he look like? Well you can find that out for yourself, I did it only took about 20 minutes on Google but then again, I knew what to look for. Let me just say this: I would be in my dream job if I share his areas of expertise when I become an attorney.

A Form of Meta Critique

This title is a bit of a misnomer but to the few select people I’ve explained it to, I think they’ll get the joke. The rest of you are out of luck (sorry). This post is also for Mikan to explain a bit about what law school is like in case I don’t get a chance to speak with her further. I majored in Legal Studies for my undergraduate degree. This first year of law school is a lot like taking all the legal studies classes (Crimanl Justice, Procedure classes, etc.) on steroids. My classes are Criminal Law, Torts, Civil Procedure, Contracts. They are more labor intensive definitely–about 20-30 pages a night for each class–and the cases usually require you to do a quick brief to understand them but if you keep up and take notes in class you should be able to keep up. It does average out depending on your own personal style and study habits to something between 3-5 hours a night. I mean it. That doesn’t even take into account the Legal Research and Legal Writing Classes. The Legal Writing assignments take hours just as in undergrad but they are even more intensive. Plan on at least 3 hours and in a few cases up to 6-7 for each week. The Legal Writing Assignments are generally easier, taking about an hour except for the really big ones. These are the only classes that are graded throughout the semester–the others only grade on finals. You can keep up the whole semester but if you blow the test you are in trouble. That’s going to be an interesting entry when we get there! One thing I can’t emphasize enough: you cannot miss class. If you miss 10 classes you fail the course automatically. If you miss something between 6-9 good luck on getting anything above a C on the final, even if you’re sick as a dog you need to dose yourself in Sudafed and struggle through it.

On Law School

Oh my God.

It’s like Highschool…. with consequences.

I am Destiny

Welcome to my new blog, Iowa Law Guy. Those of you who know me know that I’m neither from Iowa or a lawyer… at least not yet. That’s why I’m starting this blog. In a very short time I will be loading up the car with the last of my stuff and putting in an 8-hour drive south along some of the flatest land in this country, one sprouting corn and wind farms until I get to Des Moines Iowa. Once there, I’ll be spending a lot of money setting up utilities, internet access and making sure the pilot light doesn’t go off on my stove. Oh yeah, I’ll also be attending Drake University Law School. Now you know the reason I named the blog Iowa Law Guy.

So what’s the big deal? Well I’m leaving people behind, even a few I care about. This blog is a way to keep in touch with them and act as a little chronicle for my time there. I’m sure most of it will be late nights, caffeine pills and stress but I’ll be there for the Iowa Caucuses in 2008 so who knows what I might get up to. That’s another thing–one of the major things I discuss online is politics. So this might blog might get some of that up to. Feel free to comment on that when it comes up too. Oh yeah, also a pretty big baseball fan so I’ll be doing some “Base-Blogging” (as Amy Sullivan says) from time to time, or at least as long as the Twins are in the Wild Card chase.

More importantly, I control my own destiny. No debt, opportunity, all that stuff. I’ll stand or fall depending on my own actions–and that’s something I know most people don’t get to do very often. So let’s get started.

PS: Image courtesy of US Department of Energy