round two

After a studying break for the rest of June, July, and half of August (in which we traveled to Utah and back), I started studying for the lsat again.  Initially, it was MUCH harder to get out of bed and get in the groove of studying the second time around.  I really doubted my ability to do focus and improve enough to make it worth it again.  I decided to buy a new book that focused on a section of the test that I really hadn't had time to work on the first time around, the dreaded 'games' section.  After about 3-4 weeks, I had made my way through the book and was SO MUCH more capable of whooping up on a games section!  Somewhere along the way I also registered for the October 5 lsat, committing myself.  I feel I owed it to myself to try one more time. 

I approached study/preparation slightly differently this time.  I felt like I hadn't lost my understanding of the pacing needed in the timed exam so I didn't worry so much about doing as many complete lsats as I could.  Besides spending so much time on the games to build my confidence, I tried to delve deeper into the section that makes up half the score and gain a greater understanding of how the most frequent quesiton types work. 

The weekend boot camp class I had paid for and taken in May, came with the ability to take the class again, for free.  To get my money's worth I did the class again.  Not enough people signed up to take it in Houston so the company cancelled the class 6 days before but told me I could take it in Dallas.  So we loaded up the car after school on a Friday, drove to my parents' and I spent the first weekend of nice fallish weather in a room at a hotel, geeking out on lsat prep.  The class was taught by someone different than my first class had been, and while it was absolutely torturous to sit through it again, it did build my confidence (my fellow classmates were mostly light years behind where they should have been in their preparation) and I did gain some important tips. 

The most important thing for me the teacher emphasized, was that this multiple choice test was about finding the 4 wrong answers, leaving you with the right one.  Deciding to read an answer choice and say, 'no that can't be it because ____'  and marking through its letter, as opposed to, 'well I don't think that's the right answer but let me read the next ones and see what I like better' was a great tool for me.

At my first boot camp class, the interesting thing was that three out of six students had a lazy eye.  At this class, the interesting thing was 6 out of 14 students were in their 40s and 50s. In fact I'm pretty sure two of them were on a date. 

When one of the ladies sat down in a chair in front of me and turned around to say hi I thought to myself, "She's had botox!  What is she doing here?"  And over lunch with her, I found out I had met my first politician, a woman who had been on the Fort Worth City Council.  When I told my parents they were like, "Oh yeah, we know her.  She's our representative!"  (*Wait people know their specific city council representative?!)  Anyway, this woman talked my ear off during the lunch hour about how awesome, charitable, and selfless she is!  My dad calls that keeping her halo on straight.   She told me a story about how she personally helped a destitute black lady with a felony history move to a less dingy apartment.  Her husband had said to her, "Honey you can't drive your Jaguar* over to that neighborhood!"  But hey, it's okay to talk about how wealthy you are as long as you interject, "We're very blessed," every third sentence, right?  Her husband does own an oil and gas business after all, they're very blessed.  (*Sidenote, we live in a part of Houston where Jaguars are a dime a dozen so that sentence didn't even phase me, but my folks got a huge kick out of it so I included that part =)  And when we discussed a question that had to do with an election, she followed up the discussion by interjecting, "And as a former elected official myself, I concur with that answer choice." 

So anyway, the final lsat of my life was yesterday!!!!  The night before and the morning of, my stomach was just in knots.  I couldn't believe I was feeling so stressed/sick about it.  Eating breakfast had never been such a chore. I guess after a combined 4 months of studying, I hoped confidence would trump nerves but the body does what the body does, I suppose.  So I did the only thing a musician knows to do (besides pray!), I took a beta blocker!  That is fodder for another post entirely, but wow I felt so much better!  Brian was so sweet to be willing to drive me downtown so I wouldn't freak out when, sure enough, there was horrible traffic right at the exit, so we had to take a huge detour.  When I finally sat in my seat with my freshly sharpened pencils in front of me, I was cool, calm, and ready! 

I felt much better about it than the first time.  That could have been from the pill, but regardless, I'm hopeful it will be a couple points higher!  You would think I would be SURE my score would be signficantly higher, but alas, the lsat is very hard.  There were still plenty of "It's either this answer choice or this answer choice.....do I spend 30 more seconds trying to decide why it's one instead of the other, or do I just pick one and move on?"  As is the lot in life of a 'not-a-test-taker'.  Sigh.  But I did my best.  I gave it my all in my preparation, I tried my hardest yesterday morning, and I hope God guided my pencil to guess the right letter to bubble in on the questions I didn't have time for.  The Games section that I had worked so hard on this time around did NOT fluster me!  I did really well on it, I think!  So we'll see...I'll get my score by Halloween.  In the meantime, I get to shift my time to writing my essay for law school applications. 

The test took forever, after arriving at 8am, I didn't walk out of there until 1:45 and all I wanted was a large french fry.  Brian was there waiting for me with a dozen roses!  He wins!  They smell so good too!  It's pretty great to have a little role reversal.  After all these years of me supporting him through auditions, it feels really great for him to be so proud of me.  And we did get french fries on the way home! 

 

*these books look thicker in real life!  ; )

Peace out, LSAT!