Quartz sync: Sep 21, 2023, 9:11 PM

content/Attachments/Untitled.md

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-title: New Note
-tags: []
-date: 2023-09-10
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content/Essays/law-school.md

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+---
+title: On Law School
+tags:
+  - essay
+  - incomplete
+date: 2023-09-20
+draft: true
+---
+I have a lot of thoughts about law school, both as an institution and the type of culture it creates in the workforce. These include my experiences as a student and as an observer. Places and names will be altered to preserve anonymity as well as the school that I'm attending. [[#Homework/Further Reading|Prospective law students, click here]].
+## Applying
+I was one of the lucky ones that knew I wanted to be a lawyer right out of the gate. 
+
+With law school, a substantial minority of applicants are on their second career ("nontraditional students"), or view law school as a backup plan after job prospects from their recent degree didn't pan out. Teachers and aspiring history professors are plentiful in this degree.
+- Sidebar: I will say, teachers being present makes study sessions very helpful, and icebreaker parties significantly more fun!
+
+For the uninitiated, law school as a process usually looks like this:
+Take the [[Misc/lsat|entrance exam]] $\rightarrow$ apply  $\rightarrow$ first semester $\rightarrow$ 1L job offer $\rightarrow$ Second semester $\rightarrow$ 1L summer job $\rightarrow$ 2L job offer $\rightarrow$ second year $\rightarrow$ 2L summer job $\rightarrow$ career offer $\rightarrow$ third year $\rightarrow$ career.
+Sometimes, the timing of job offers will be delayed, as it depends on the type of employment that you're pursuing. I talk about this more in the [[#Job Prospects]] section.
+
+In this process, it feels like every step is more daunting than the last. 
+
+There are a lot of equitable concerns and shady dealings with law school applications, as well as a lot of conflicting opinions. 
+## Your First Year
+
+### Detour: Constitutional Law
+
+## Job Prospects
+### "Big Law"
+
+### "Public Interest"
+
+## Ethical Obligations
+
+## Homework/Further Reading
+For those considering law school, I'd like to suggest two resources to you.
+
+During my undergraduate studies, I stumbled across an excellent account by Rhett Campbell, a retired energy bankruptcy attorney. At the time I found these (and presumably when they were updated), he was the CEO of a nonprofit called the Terry Foundation. A lot of his opinions hold up, and I've uploaded them here as PDFs at [[Attachments/why-not-to-go-to-law-school.pdf|Why Not to Go to Law School]] and [[Attachments/law-study.pdf|Guide to Making Good Grades in Law School]]. All credit goes to Campbell for these resources. If you only take two things from these documents, let them be "**law school is hell**" and "**outline early, outline often**."
+- Sidebar: I do agree with Campbell's view that there's a certain "fire in the belly" that you need to be a lawyer. I think I satisfied this because reading these documents made me excited, not stressed.
+- Sidebar x2: The resources he recommended weren't that helpful. The real value of his writings is his firsthand experience. 
+
+During the application "cycle," I also enjoyed Kathryne Young's book How to be Sort of Happy in Law School, and I think it provides a realistic expectation of what it means to be a law student while also being a person. Some of what I talk about in the [[#Detour Constitutional Law|detour on con law]] comes straight from her book.

content/Misc/lsat.md

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+---
+title: LSAT
+tags:
+  - misc
+  - glossary
+date: 2023-09-21
+---
+The Law School Admissions Test ("LSAT") is a timed multiple-choice and written test administered by the Law School Admissions Counsel ("LSAC"). It's designed to provide some indicator of performance in law school, and it's bad at its job. An applicant's score on the LSAT (between 120 and 180) is the primary metric that law schools examine when determining whether to extend them an offer of admissions
+
+It consists of three types of multiple choice sections:
+- Analytical Reasoning (aka "Logic Games")
+	- Several small sets of incomplete logic problems that involve grouping/assigning/picking/ordering some objects into defined categories or based on their attributes.
+	- Easily the most foreign section that requires a specific method for most people to score highly. Once you know the method, every setup becomes trivial, and this setup is also the easiest to get perfect if you do enough repetitions.
+	- Example, because these problems are strange:
+		- A problem describing 7 different named dinosaurs and 4 different colors. 
+		- Based on the rules, you must choose 5 dinosaurs and what color they are. 
+		- Rules are given about when certain dinosaurs are what colors, how many of some colors are included, and if some dinosaurs are included or excluded depending on other inclusions or exclusions.
+		- The questions in the set about this problem could ask you to identify an additional implicit rule found by conditional logic substitution, determine which set of 5 could be a valid combination given the rules, or to determine what must/must not be true about a combination if that combination has a certain extra rule attached to it.
+- Logical Reasoning
+	- Short word problems involving one question of summary, policy, word choice, support, logical fallacy identification, or conditional logic.
+	- A more squishy section requiring you to choose the *best* answer more often than not. Weighing these is inherently subjective and really involves knowing the test and question types more than knowing any sort of inherent property. 
+- Reading
+	- Medium length essays or book passages that will ask a set of questions including summary, word choice, main points, substitution, support, and content.
+	- Also a somewhat squishy section, albeit easier to answer if you've read the content thoroughly.
+	- Reading the content thoroughly is the hardest part, as these are very dense passages to digest and critically analyze under the time limit.
+
+The number of each of these sections has fluctuated somewhat.
+- Historically, it's been 5: 1 LG, 2 LR, 1 W, and 1 experimental section which could be any of the above. You are not told which section is experimental, and they are presented in a random order.
+- Over the global pandemic, the fully remote LSAT Flex involved only three sections: 1 LG, 1 LR, 1 W. Same ordering and disclosure notes.
+- LSAC then moved to a fully remote four-section system, tacking on an experimental section to the LSAT Flex with the same ordering and disclosure notes. LSAC has since begun administering this four-section test in person as well.
+
+There's also a required Writing section which law schools don't look at as closely. It's just an essay, and many schools will require separate essays which they'll actually examine rather than the Writing section. It's also only required once, and if you have a valid LSAT Writing score but retake the main exam, you won't be required to write another essay.

content/Updates/2023/sept.md

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 - I fiddled with the [[index|homepage]] a bit.
 - I added comments with Remark42, and documented it [[Projects/Obsidian/quartz-comments|here]].
 - I started fleshing out [[Projects/my-computer|My Computer]].
-- I'm researching and angling towards fully writing through the essay on [[Essays/why-i-garden|Why I Garden]].
+- I'm researching and angling to fully write through the essay on [[Essays/why-i-garden|Why I Garden]].
+- I'm working towards writing an essay on law school and its problems as an institution. 
 ## Status Updates
 - I finally got around to looking into Mastodon and the Fediverse more broadly. The ideas are *insanely* cool. Expect pages and maybe projects on it in future.
 - I swapped from a custom compiled Zen kernel to the CachyOS-Bore-EEVDF kernel available in the Copr repos, and holy crap, the performance is night and day. All of the options in games that would lock my CPU-bound EGPU setup to less than 60 frames are now open to me, and graphical fidelity is better than ever.

content/index.md

@@ -25,13 +25,6 @@ That's the [Graph View](https://help.obsidian.md/Plugins/Graph+view). It's an [[
 The Backlinks pane is a list of all pages that link to this site in content. Because you’re on the homepage, it’s empty. On content pages, it’ll be more substantial and serve as a convenient navigation tool. 
 
 # What else do I need to know?
-### Rough sitemap 
-This should be a mostly complete textual site listing in case, like me, you find the aforementioned [[#What the hell is that spiderweb thing?|Graph View]] a bit too un-navigable for practical use.
-- [[Projects/home|Projects I've worked on]]
-- [[Programs I Like/home|Programs that I like]]
-- [[Essays/home|Long-form, source-citing articles]]
-- [[Misc/home|Miscellaneous writings]]
-
 ### Epistemological disclosure
 Please accept that I reserve the right to be wrong on this website. I don’t claim to be an expert on any of the subject matter within. As this site reflects a learning process, I’m also liable to change my mind if I research an issue further. I’ll document if this happens.