obstinatebarstudier-blog

[obstinatebarstudier-blog]

Self-Studying for the bar: The Beginning--Who am I and What is this

“God helps those that help themselves.” This has been one of my favorite expressions for a long time. Perhaps the most ironic thing, is that I am in no way religious. What I am however, is a deep believer that in this day and age, a person can teach oneself how to do almost anything. 

I have applied this philosophy to almost everything in life. I am a highly ambitious and creative Tulane Law 3L who successfully self-studied for the LSAT, taught myself fluent Spanish (eventually studying abroad in Buenos Aires, Argentina as a law student taking classes exclusively in Spanish), started my own business (largely a failure but I learned a lot), and now I am going to self-study and sit for the 2017 July Uniform Bar Exam. Am I crazy?

Really,  I just don’t like being condemned to classrooms and sitting through lectures. I’ve already done enough of that in my life with undergrad and then law school. This is a lifestyle decision. I’m graduating in May after taking a brutal 17 credit hours this semester (should have planned better), and the last thing I want to do after I graduate is sit through a really heavy and boring commercial bar course everyday for weeks. I also don’t have very much money at this point in my life. I really would just prefer to do this final chapter of my education from the comfort of my home with my cat, Gaucho. I  and I am confident that I can do this, myself.  I could go on a sentence or two more attempting to rationalize to the reader my reasons further, but I’m obstinate about this one thing and not changing my mind. I believe that where there are published books explicitly telling one how to do something, and the internet, that anything can be learned.

This is an EXPERIMENT. We will see how this goes. I’m going to draw on my previous experiences and shortcomings (yes looking back I would have done some things differently in self-studying for the LSAT) of successfully self-preparing myself for the LSAT and learning Spanish with only books and practice with natives.  I am going to chronicle my complete strategy and my approach here, the resources I choose to use, my lifestyle while studying (I plan to live my life), etc. My goal is to ultimately develop a resource for others to use to help them successfully self-study for the bar. If I inspire you to self-study for the bar, then great. At the minimum, I am doing this blog because I believe it will generally be a constructive thing to do. It will keep me systematic in my approach, oriented towards the deadlines, and hopefully the reader community will give me good feedback and suggestions. 

If you feel like making the journey with me--A.K.A. self studying for the Uniform Bar Exam (it’s “Uniform” guys, come on we can do this!), then please reach out and lets form a little community of obstinate UBE self-studiers. I’m going to embrace the hashtag #UBEselfstudying on my social media “things,” to try and get this going. There are probably very few of us, so we need to support each other in this endeavor.