Back in New York

Last semester, rejuvenated from a spectacular summer vacation, motivated by a trio of laughably easy internships, and whipped into a near frenzy by the process of interviewing for a summer job, I made a colossal mistake -- I enrolled in too many classes.

To be completely fair, it wasn't entirely my fault. Prior to this moment, classes had been assigned to us. The beginning of second year of law school marked the first opportunity to pick your own classes and design your own schedule. The only real indication of how heavy of an academic burden I had assumed, my credit load, signaled no alarm: I was taking one credit more than the minimum, two credits less than the maximum of 15, and less credits than either semester of my first year.

But all was not as it seemed.

Beneath that calm surface lurked a leviathan with an insatiable hunger for free time: Patent Law. The professor of this course believed adamantly that her two-credit course was worth twice that amount of credit, and, accordingly, she assigned an amount of reading better suited to this inflated value. That meant more work than I had anticipated, and, considering my other responsibilties, more work than I wanted to take on. Yet, for some unknown reason, a syllabus full of arduous reading assignments did not compel me to drop the offending class. And so I perservered despite knowing full well that I'd made a grave miscalculation.

As you may have been able to tell from a few of the December posts, this mistake caught up to me at the end of the semester when I suffered through four grueling exams streching over the entire finals period. After two weeks at home, however, I've finally recovered from that traumatic period of academic stress. Unfortunately, now that vacation is over; it's time to once again hit the books.

It is crucial for my health and sanity that the errors of yesterday inform the actions of today. With that perspective in mind, I've taken several actions. To ease my academic load, I enrolled in one less class than last semester -- three rather than four. In addition, I purposely avoided any courses taught by the delusional professor, thereby preventing hours and hours of agony. And because I already have a job lined up, I've decided that impressing prospective employers is no longer a priority, I can reduce my participation in extra-curriculur activities.

All in all, this should yield a much more satisfiying experience.