The Extra Stuff

Today I got to be the comic relief for some fellow law students. The reason? The things that I bring into the four hour exam. It’s funny, I suppose, but I never even thought twice about it. It is clearly a leftover from years of field trips and step-parenting. It’s funny how you can never get rid of that “be prepared for everything” mentality. You never know misery until you have been on a walking field trip with twenty-five kids and no band-aids. Or until you find yourself on an afternoon hike with four year old FRD and no snack. So now I present, for you laughing pleasure, what I’m thinking when I decide what to set out on my table space during a four hour exam:

• First there’s the notes. If it’s an open note exam, I bring them all. I print out every case brief, every note, every outline that I’ve done. I organize them all in a binder with tabs and colored highlighting. I’ve only opened that binder once during an exam, but boy was I glad I had it then. I knew that I had read something in a case that applied to the problem, so I checked my handy dandy case list, turned to the appropriate page in my binder and ripped the page out for a quick perusal. Truthfully, just going through the organization process of printing everything, reading everything, making outlines and graphs and charts, and lists and table of contents for outlines is pretty much the only thing I do to study. Once I’ve made all that crap, I rarely look at it again. But just in case I want to, it’s all there with me, sitting next to my laptop while I furiously try to type something coherent during the exam. (Admittedly, the notes aren’t the funny part. . . but they are part of the overall picture).


• Highlighters: I like to have a lot of them, because I like to use different colors to highlight different things, so I pretty much just bring a big pile of them in.


• Several pens. . . I mean come on. . . what if one of them ran out of ink during my exam. . .keep reading. . .I’ll get to the funny stuff


• I also keep a few different shapes and sizes of post-it notes out. Okay, I’ve never actually used a post-it note during an exam, but you never know when you might need a post it note.


• Okay. . . . I also like to have a bottle of water. . . and a bottle of diet coke. The water is in case I get thirsty. The diet coke is in case I need a caffeine buzz. I don’t actually drink caffeine (for many years now) so when I do it’s like a drug. A totally legal, pick-me-up during four hours of essay writing? Who wouldn’t want that?


• Now of course, I also like to have a snack. I mean can you imagine taking an exam and suddenly finding yourself ravishingly hungry and then having to sit there for three and a half more hours? I’d die! So I keep a pile of chocolate (in case it’s near the end and I just need the sugar/caffeine buzz to push me on through) and a more substantial snack (like pretzels, in case the hunger hits early on and I need something to fill me up). I can’t say that I ever used the pretzels, but I often eat the chocolate during the exam. During the torts exam last semester I believe that I ate 10 Hershey kisses. It was our last exam and my body just didn’t feel like it would make it.


• Yes, I also keep chap stick and hand lotion out. Stop laughing and read my reason. I mean can you imagine realizing half way through an exam that your lips are chapped or hands are cracked? I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on anything else. I would just sit there, licking my lips forgetting everything I know about the subject, just aching for some chap stick. Hasn’t happened to me yet. . . but it could. And I’d be prepared. I’d be ready with my cherry chap stick.

Ok, that’s pretty much it. See it doesn’t sound quite as funny as it looks piled up next to my lap top. Of course, this time I also brought socks in. Wait! It can get cold in the law school! What if my feet got cold? I would never be able to concentrate with cold feet.

So there you have it. Me and my crazy, over-prepared pile of stuff to get me through four hours that pass faster than a sit com. I never did bring in band-aids. . . maybe I should do that next time.