Bar Exam Pass Rates ...

Depressing anecdote:

I found out (officially) that I passed the bar in the morning. My brother takes me out to lunch to celebrate a couple hours later. I get back to my office and my phone is ringing. It's my brother. Our dad had collapsed. He never regained consciousness and died a few days later.

My mom tells me that he knew I had passed, but I'm not sure he would have much given a shit. He wasn't one to go around giving praise for what the hell you're supposed to do.

 

The last paragraph is interesting, and not just because your wife called you a dumbass. For getting into college, it's the opposite when it comes to the size of the letter. A thin envelope means you didn't get in, while a fat one means you did, because of extra paperwork.

It also reminds me of the late 80s/early 90s movie "How I Got Into College", in which in one scene, there's a line of teens waiting to use the one pay phone when the one girl using it keeps asking her mom, "is the envelope fat, or what?" And the mom keeps sounding confused as the girl keeps repeating the question, gets all agitated, finally screams "Fat or Skinny! AHHHHH" then hangs up, and a bunch of kids behind her start reaching for the phone at once.

 

I have a kind of funny anecdote about one of the cardinal steps along my journey ...

So, as a doctoral student, I faced qualifying comps (imagine taking -- Monday, Wednesday and Friday -- cumulative finals for 12 masters-level courses), then later written comprehensives (two days in a conference room with a non-networked laptop and huge stacks of photocopied research papers), then later oral comprehensives, then an oral defense of my proposed dissertation, then a final oral defense of the finished product. The last one is a public procedure ... there's a process by which the entire university faculty is invited at least 10 business days beforehand). Generally you're not allowed to even talk about scheduling the last one until everyone on your committee (at a minimum your chair) says it's a go.

So, I send my (hopefully) close-to-the-last draft to my chair on a Monday. That Friday, which is the Friday before fall break, I gently email her, asking her if maybe, just maybe, she'd taken a look at it. Immediately I get a very aggravated email raking me over the coals for even asking, when we'd agreed (before she signed on as my chair) that two weeks was the minimum for feedback. I apologized and busied myself with other matters, but just to vent a bit I forwarded the email to my wife, saying something along the lines of "Boy, I'll be glad when I don't have to put up with this shit anymore." Later in the afternoon, I was on the phone with my wife and asked "Did you get that email?" "No, nothing." I started to get nervous. "Would you check now?" "Sure. Nope, nothing. What's wrong?" "Nothing ... I'll tell you about it later."

I was terrified. My wife's name and my chair's are very similar, and I just knew I'd inadvertently emailed that to my chair rather than my wife. I just knew it.

Couple of hours later my wife called. She'd finally received the email. I've been relieved in my life, but I doubt there have been many moments when I was that relieved.

 

My bar exam story, since we're sharing: The exam is on a Tuesday. Sunday morning I wake up and my sweet old hound dog has vomited and urinated on herself. She can't walk. She had a sad and panicked look on her face. I knew this day was coming, but really had no idea it would be so sudden. So I take her down to the emergency vet, ridiculously packing my flash cards thinking I might try to study a little more while we're waiting to be seen, fully expecting that I'm going to have to make that decision that every pet owner dreads.

They take her in the back to examine her, while leaving me out there with my flash cards, and I wait for a couple of hours before they're ready to tell me anything. We live close to a vet school, and use its emergency services when needed, which is why it takes longer than normal.

Vet and a couple of students come out and tell me she's got this thing called "old dog vestibular syndrome." It typically clears itself up in 48 hours, but for the next 48 hours she'll be an absolute mess.

It could be far worse, I know. Just a dog, etc. But I was so distracted for those two days that I convinced myself there was no way I could pass. And one of the essays did end up being in an area of law that I knew nothing about. The rumor here is like what Dick was saying about Illinois, that if you do well on the MBE they don't actually look at your essays. Oh well, I passed, and that old dog lived two more years.