Oh the Stress

After a long day (and I mean 16 hours of studying long), I sit back and realize that I have all of Monday and Tuesday morning before my Corporations final. This is way more tome than I need. In fact, after a little touching up tomorrow morning, I could be ready to take the final tomorrow afternoon. But alas, the final is prescheduled and I am forced to take it Tuesday afternoon. This may seem to the untrained observer like a gift of and extra day to get everything down absolutely. But the problem is, I have to take my Pass-through Business Taxation final by Friday morning. But I can't start studying for it until after I take the corporations final (because of the new informaiton displacing the old information phenomenon).

This means that I have a full three and a half days to study for corporations, but a mere two days to study for Pass-Through. And, for the record, Pass-Through Business taxation is, according to my professor who knows a thing or two about this, the single most complicated area of federal income taxation. Corporations on the other hand (no offense to Lenny) is an introductory type course with no really conceptually difficult aspects (maybe with the exceptions of insider trading liability and poison pill takeover defenses). Don't get me wrong, there's a decent amount of info, but the challenge isn't in understanding, it's in memorizing.

So here I am, a day and a half before my corporations exam, worrying about my pass-thru exam on Friday. I never really understood how people could get stressed about school before I got to law school. And even in my first year, when maybe I didn't take it that seriously, it didn't ever seem overwhelming. In college, I never studied for more than an hour and a half in a sitting. Now I study as much as sixteen hours in twenty-four hour period. And the thing is, even if I could study for the full sixty-two hours between my corporations exam and my pass-thru exam, I don't know if I would consider myself prepared for the exam. Scary.

I should point out though, that even though it's a lot of work and at times the stress can be high, law school is great. If I were to compare how I feel the morning of a day-long study session for any law class (maybe not evidence) with how I would feel if confronted with a day-long study session for ancient greek, the law studying would win, and it wouldn't even be close. If you want to feel vital and smart, I recommend getting a bachelor's degree in Classics and then going to law school. It really puts things in perspective.