Midterm Madness

The midterm examination week is fast-approaching. That translates into a lot of sleepless nights, headaches, stress, and pressure - studying at home or in Dunkin Donuts or Chowking til 5 in the morning, getting a couple of hours of sleep, and then going to school haggard, and sitting in the library the whole day.

Exams in law school is like no other. In this two-week period, you feel all the pressure, you get tense, and ultimately the stress takes a toll on you. You have a lot of reading to do - hundreds and hundreds of pages of textbooks and cases. If you haven't been following the lectures of the professors for the past weeks, then it is the time to catch up on all the readings. And then people say that you have to undergo at least 3 readings before you could fully understand what you have read.

Midterms also is a time when you have to submit certain requirements for the different subjects, so you have to find a way to balance the doing of these projects and papers and the actual studying. In our case, we have to submit digests of around 146 cases in constitutional law, plus a 25-page minimum paper about the world's different legal systems.

One has to prepare for a tough stretch like this, not only mentally, but also physically. When I say this, I mean lots of food! The only way I could keep awake the whole night is by consuming all the goodies and sweets I could get my hands on - chocolates, chips, candies, and lots more. Just enough to make my brain last until breakfast.

Reading thick books, cross-referencing the stuff you read with codals, jurisprudence, and your "handy-dandy" legal dictionary. Doing all these while having something to eat or drink.

The only refuge I could think of is knowing that you're not along. All your classmates are probably just as busy and tense as you are.

In the end, when the brain-draining exams finally come, you just hope that you could remember even just a parcel of what you have read.

I guess I gotta start doing all the crazy stuff I just said... epekto ra nis pagtuon