Blog Entry 10

The end is near…

Today started off normally with our contracts class, and then we had our last regularly scheduled ALTA class of the semester. We started off with Q&A about our final assignment due 1am Thursday, and then she decided to hand back our research quizzes today (which was the only thing on the agenda for Thursday’s class). Obviously, the end of our first semester deserves a party…and my professor wholeheartedly agreed. It’s on Thursday.

After classes, I met briefly with my ALTA professor for a last-minute question about a section in my paper and then went home for a couple hours before heading out to babysit for the afternoon. I ended up with a migraine, which made even the thought of working on my client letter unbearable. Fortunately, a quick nap was sufficient to more or less clear it up, and now I am writing this blog post while my mom makes dinner.

While I’m on the subject of feeling lousy, let me say that maintaining your physical health is probably the most important thing during law school. During undergrad, illness could be worked around: missing class for illness was common and if you did go to class, the workload was light enough that if you rested and didn’t do homework for a couple nights, it really wasn’t that big of a deal. Yeah, it doesn’t quite happen that way in law school. Because the workload is so extensive, skipping one night of homework means you are going to make yourself miserably busy for the rest of the week…not quite the way to recover from an illness. (And that’s only if you are sufficiently ahead that you are even able to skip a night’s worth of reading…)

My ALTA professor has been telling us throughout the semester to make sure we are taking care of ourselves. It gets so easy to fall into bad habits: staying up late/getting up early, eating for convenience rather than nutritional value, loading up on the caffeine, not taking the time to work out…and then there’s the stress. I HIGHLY recommend getting into a good routine now; it will make your transition to law school that much easier. Get into a workout schedule, start taking vitamins, work on finding quick and healthy snacks and meals, try to cut down your time-wasting evening habits (I know how easy it is to quickly go online to check your e-mail before bed, one webpage leads to another, and the next thing you know it’s an hour later)…

And on that note, I should really stop ranting here and work on my client letter so that I can get to bed at a reasonable time…