After months of studying and working my post-grad ass off for the LSAT, I finally got my score. After weeks of waiting and anxious e-mail checking (I had to remove email messages from my Blackberry because every time my phone lit up or beeped, my heart would stop), the message letting me know whether or not I’d be able to apply to the schools I’m interested in or not appeared. As the message sat in my inbox, I took a deep breath to see the reality of what I’ve worked so hard for.

And instantly, I felt disappointed.  See, because I have student loans from undergrad, I am very cautious about paying for law school. In order to combat massive amounts of student loans, my goal was to go to law school with the bulk of my expenses paid for or a full-scholarship. Depending on what law school you want to go to, the option of a scholarship could be determined by one to two points. And unfortunately, where I want to be and the amount of money I want is not a reality right now. Talk about a cold hard slap in the face!

With months of dedicated LSAT studying behind me, I feel discouraged. If money wasn’t an issue, I would just dust myself off, suck it up, take the test again and not worry about the outcome or the prospective costs. However, money to pay for school is the end-all-be-all for me right now (you know, unless I win the lottery or the Publisher’s Clearing House comes to my place with a big check and balloons). It sucks, but hey, a girl has to look at the big picture and consider everything.

A lot of people feel the liberty to say “told you so” to me right now. However, feeling a setback from the score doesn’t surprise me like some may think. My goals and scholarship options were set very high. I went into this knowing the very specific set scores for different schools and what it would take to get the money I need. Trust me, it’s been on my mind for months.

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Some people train for marathons – spending every day building their endurance, improving their time, and practicing so they will be able to cross the finish line. I’ve been spending the last five months doing all of the above, but I’m definitely not running a marathon anytime soon. Instead, I’m taking the LSAT … this coming Saturday.

I never thought this day would come. I’ve spent countless hours taking prep classes, practice tests, doing timed sections, going over my mistakes, cranking out logic games, reasoning with myself over logical reasoning, and reading about some of the most obscene topics for the reading comprehension section, all in preparation for this day. A day I’m not sure I’m mentally prepared for; practice vs. the real deal … well, it seems so much different.

However, I have to say – I’m relieved it’s here. In fact, you could almost say that I’m pumped and ready to go. I’ve worked my ass off, and I’m ready to see the fruits of my post-grad labor. Over the last few months, there have been a million other things I rather do than answer assumption and inference questions, but I’ve sucked it up and knocked it out.

Although I’m one of those Nervous Nancy’s when it comes to test taking, I’m trying to not let my nerves get in the way of everything I’ve accomplished since July. When I first started studying for the LSAT, I never dreamed that I could do as well as I have been doing. In fact, I never anticipated that I would spend as much time as I have. But the process has been rewarding, and it’s made me want to go to law school even more. If anything, I feel like this process has taught me that I really can do anything I want, if I just dedicate the right amount of time and effort into it.

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Everyone has a story. And while my post-grad journey has so far revolved around moving to California, interning, working odd jobs here and there, and studying for the LSAT to attend law school next year, I know that my story isn’t a typical after-college route. In fact, I don’t think there is a typical after-college route, which is why life after college is so exciting and so scary. It varies from person to person and it’s difficult for every individual post-grad to gauge their success when there’s nothing to compare it to.

Sometimes I like to pretend that I’m living a different post-grad life than I am. I even sometimes think about marketing post-grad stories to Bravo or MTV because everyone I know seems to have their own story. Some lives are more stressful than others, and some are boring. Some people are still strictly obsessed with college and continue to spend the majority of their new existence going back. Some post-grads are completely different than a year ago.

But they are all interesting in their own right.

I know my personal experience, but that doesn’t stop me from thinking and wondering about other post-grad scenarios. For example: Read More »

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Back-to-school is right around the corner, and for many of you, the inevitable final year of college is looming.

Breathe in.
Breathe out.
It’s going to be OK.

Heading into your senior year well-prepared (and well-hydrated) makes all the difference, so here’s 9 things to keep in mind before you embark on the beginning of the end:

1. Check on Everything:
First things first, make a meeting with your academic advisor (yes, you have one) and make sure you have all the classes you need to graduate. If not – sign up for them immediately. Don’t wait to take your second required P.E. class until the last semester  — the classes could fill up and leave the only option available something that doesn’t fit with your academic schedule. (Or worse, it could be at 8am on a Friday.) Figure out if you have departmental requirements to fulfill. Find out when deadlines are and what the expectations are. Be aware of every step required towards you wearing your cap and gown and grabbing that diploma at the end of the year.

2. Senior Participation:
If your school has any special senior traditions or rights-of-passages, prepare for them. Do you need to decorate a special gown to wear for on-campus events? If so, get busy and decorate! Plan to participate in everything. Your hard work over the last three years has earned you this upperclassmen status, so bask in its glory!

3. Prep:
If you are planning to attend any kind of graduate school or professional program after college, set up a schedule for what needs to get done. If you are taking an exam such as the LSAT or GRE, and you haven’t started studying – figure out what you’re doing. If you’re ready to start applying to schools, ask for your letters of recommendation (while your professors still remember you/have time to write one!) and set a date to send your personal statement out. Make sure you have a schedule to stick to because once school gets going, things get crazy. Read More »

There comes a tipping point where you have to say “enough is enough,” and you either need to fix what is driving you to the edge or take a step back to realize what needs to be fixed. My tipping point just arrived and resulted in me saying: “I quit!”

So, you know those people I was playing nanny for? Besides the peach cobbler incident, things have been okay. In fact, the family hired me on as their accountant/bookkeeper – so I have been doing tax forms and working with thousands and thousands of receipts for the last few weeks. However, things started going south pretty fast once I started playing the role of babysitter and bookkeeper!

There were tons of demands. It was like once they had me around all the time, they would do anything to keep me there. For example, I would give the family my schedule and they would be mad because I had LSAT class or a few hours out of the day blocked off to study – things they knew when they hired me from the start. They started wanting me to nanny and do bookkeeping work at the same time – but they only wanted to pay me for bookkeeping, despite me watching their young children. Then it turned into almost full-time hours, when I only want to work part-time. And, the worst part was when the pay became sporadic. As I write this, I still need to be paid for nearly a $100 worth of work. Do I think I’ll see the money? No, but at least I’ll have my sanity back. Read More »

I’ve been in California for nearly two months now, but everyone I run into asks the same question: “Are you going to move here permanently?” Those back in Georgia frequently ask me “Do you see yourself moving back home?” And of course, with the LSAT on my mind 24/7, the inevitable question of “Where do you want to go to law school?” comes up. Apparently all things post-grad rely on geography!

Where you go to law school matters a lot – especially for where you want to live. If you go to a school that isn’t nationally recognized, job perspectives outside of that region shrink. Am I spending all of my time thinking about law school in the context of location? No – there are more initial factors, but picking a future residence does have a major importance. But how daunting is that? Although it may be a little drastic to say, it really feels like I have to answer “Where do you want to live for the rest of your life?” right now at this very second.

So, the plan was to move out here – get my post-grad life together, and then figure out where to go after I worked hard enough to make my plans happen. Since I’ve been here, a lot of people assume this is where I plan to reside forever. Do I want to end up in Orange County or Southern California forever? Honestly, I don’t know if it’s for me. While California is gorgeous, I still don’t feel like I can call this place home. I haven’t had my “ah-ha” moment of residential happiness. Read More »

Life lesson #43298: What you think you should do is sometimes completely different than what you want to do – If only I could jump back to last summer to tell myself!

For what seems like forever, I have told everyone from friends, random people at parties, teachers, and family members that upon graduating undergrad, I would head off to graduate school to a M.A. or Ph.D. program in English literature. In fact, during my first year of college while my classmates were mostly concerned with figuring out their major requirements, I obsessed over taking the right classes designed for graduate school track students, finding the right internships, and doing everything the right way towards getting to graduate school – ruling everything out that did not fit in the perfect English grad school box I put myself in.

As you can imagine, it’s a rather rude awakening when everything doesn’t fall into place like you planned for it to.  Looking back, the moment I realized that my plans were not something I really 100% wanted to do anymore was during a conference meeting with my thesis advisor. She asked me why I wanted to attend graduate school. I was silent. I had no answer. I sputtered off some generic – the “I’d like to advance my studies in literature” excuse. But it felt so fake, so fabricated, and hearing myself say it bothered me. I didn’t like the way it rolled off the tip of my tongue. I didn’t like the way it made me feel about where I wanted to go in my future.

There is a huge problem when you don’t really have an answer as to why you are doing something major like applying to graduate programs, and this started the downward spiral of my graduate school plans. Another red flag was my honors thesis project. Like many seniors, I was completing a sixty-page thesis project (I was working in the area of girls’ fiction in children’s literature). I picked the topic myself, but not even a month or two into the project, I hated it. I wanted nothing to do with what I was writing and saying and researching. There I was working on something very similar to what I would be doing in graduate school, completely unhappy. Not good, right? Read More »

[We're following one post-grad as she grabs that diploma, packs up her college life and heads on out to the big, bad world. There's a lot of change comin' her way and one big challenge: The LSAT.]

So, it’s crunch time. From this point on until October 9^th, my life is really about one thing and one thing only – the LSAT. Of course, I will still have everyday life to live, but from this point on my post-grad life really is going to be dictated by what I am convinced to be as one of the most evil tests in all of existence.

And I’ll be the first to admit – I am terrified. I’m absolutely shaking in my Rainbow flip flops at the thought of one test having so much power over my life.

You gotta do what you gotta do though, right? And what I have to do is do well enough on the test in October, so I don’t have to take it again in December, and come out with a score that satisfies me enough to get into a good law school for Fall 2011 admissions.

A lot is riding upon this exam. If you aren’t familiar with the whole “getting into law school business of admissions,” the LSAT is the end-all-be-all factor in admissions. According to Top Law Schools.com, “Your undergraduate GPA and LSAT score are the two most significant factors that admissions committees look at. The fact that a four hour standardized test carries as much, if not more, weight than four years of classes should tell you how important the LSAT is.” Yikes! Read More »

I don't know what to do!

Looking back, college didn’t require a lot of serious decision making – even though I thought it did. For the most part, I made decisions about frivolous things such as: Should I wear pajamas to class today? Should I stick to rum and Coke or go for the Jager bombs? Should I go out tonight or should I spend time working on that eleven-page term paper? I know at times these choices sure stressed me out, but looking back, they really didn’t matter the way post-grad decisions seem to.

A lot of difficult decisions have come my way recently. There was me deciding where to live. Atlanta, Georgia or Southern California? It was not an easy choice to make, and many factors played into my choice to move to California. Then there was the decision of what to spend my time doing. Should I reapply to graduate schools for next year or pursue my other dream of becoming a lawyer? These questions required a lot of long-term thinking, and I’m glad that I had the time and the options to choose from. However, now that life is moving full speed ahead – more life-decisions are coming my way and many of them are giving me a day to decide, instead of a month or two.

So, you know how I was running my mouth last week about no jobs being available and how awful it is trying to find something? Well, that very same day, I received a call back from a marketing firm wanting to hire me for an entry level position. A real adult job. One with benefits and a respectable first year salary. One that requires business professional attire from 8:30am to 5:30pm. A marketing firm with connections to major Fortune 500 companies.

Sounds great, right? Well, they could only take me on as a full-time worker Monday-Friday, with a lot of events that I would be required to attend on the weekends. My initial reaction was whether or not I could balance my LSAT prep course and study time in the midst of having a blossoming career path. Could I do both? Maybe, but I’m not someone that does things half-assed, so a balancing act possibly could jeopardize my work experience and hurt my practice for the LSAT. Read More »