My Journey to the New York Bar - Exam Day Two

Once again I was already awake at ridiculous o'clock (around 3.30am) because my body clock was still in UK time!

I did a bit of light reading the night before in preparation for the second day but it was more of a refresher, going through some notes rather than try to cram in new information on top of what I already knew.

I took my time in the morning to get ready and have breakfast and kept my mind as clear as possible. No stress and no over analysing! Sam came to pick me up again and we drove to the exam venue.

 I was pretty confident, not over confident but not in doubt or uncertain whether I was ready for the exams. I had prepared myself better this time round and focused on strengthening my knowledge on the topics I struggled with last time.

Enduring an exam that has 200 multiple choice questions which you sit for a total of six hours in one day (which is spilt into two, three hour segment), is not easy at all. Especially when the exam covers seven different areas of law and you have no idea how they will appear on the exam.

Question one could be contract law, question two evidence, questions three criminal law and question four another contracts question. You literally have about 1.8 minutes to read through the question (some are long scenarios), then eliminate the irrelevant information, pinpoint the relevant parts, understand exactly what it is they are asking you, narrow it down to main legal issue, remember the rules, apply the relevant rules to the question and from the four question answers available, choose the one that is the answer you've came up with or the one that is as close as possible to the answer you came up with in your head.

Tricky as it may be, it's a skill required to be a good lawyer and after sitting the bar exam, I understand why this exam is known as one of the most difficult exams to take within the global legal profession and why it's so highly regarded and respected, once you have it under your belt.

Fast forward to the end of the exam and I was ready to get out of there and rest! It really does take a lot out of you. I didn't take a flight back to NYC from Buffalo and instead decided to catch a bus and enjoy a nine hour journey from upstate New York to Manhattan. Yes, nine hours.

I didn't have time to do any sightseeing or get to know the area during my 7 day stay in Buffalo as my sole purpose of being there was for the exams. So, I took the opportunity to have a mini road trip and see what there was to upstate New York through the window of a bus.

The bus actually drove through Pittsburg Pennsylvania and other surrounding cities before reaching Manhattan. I took videos of places we drove through and it was interesting to see the different type of neighbourhoods there were from trailer park area to brown wooden houses by the lakes, small villages and towns.

 I left Buffalo at 6am and arrived in New York shortly after 3pm. My flight back to London was a night flight to I had enough time to get to the airport. Then it was time to go home...

My Journey to the New York Bar - Exam Day One

One of the things I am really thankful for during my journey to the New York Bar is that a Facebook and WhatsApp group was created for those of us who were doing the home study programme with Bar Bri International.

I had a 'study partner' who I could reach out to if I needed clarity on an issue I wasn't sure about or when I just needed someone to talk to about the exams. Her name was Samantha and she became my study partner by default, but looking back I believe it was meant to be. We lived in different cities in the UK at the time, so we mainly communicated via WhatsApp.

When we sat the bar exam in July 2016, we found out that we were both staying in the same area in Brooklyn, which was great because I had someone to speak to, have lunch with and travel back with after the exam. Neither of us passed the exam first time and we were reunited as we re-sat the exam in Buffalo. The last days leading up to the exam, she was the only person I really spoke to as we were both focused on the same thing. We travelled to and from the exam venue together.

Tuesday 22nd February 2017, day one of the exam. I went to sleep early the night before, but because my body clock was still adjusting to the time zone in New York, I was awake by 4am!! Breakfast at the hotel wasn't even until open until 6am. I spent time with God, reading my Bible and praying, then got ready.  When it was time for breakfast, I went to get something to eat and took a few revision notes with me just to read over breakfast.

I was quite relaxed and had a positive mindset. I had done all that I could do, so I didn't see a reason to fret and get all anxious. I had confidence and faith! Samantha came to pick me up and we went travelled to the exam venue.

I felt like day one of the exam went well. Despite not spending much time studying for the Multistate Performance Test section of the exam, I was so happy when one of the examexercises was to provide advise on an intestacy/wills issue, because it was almost identical to the only two practice exercises I did two days before!

In the afternoon, we had six essay questions to write. One of them was about corporations a topic, I confess that I didn't do much studying on because I really didn't think it would come up on the exam this time around. Well I was wrong! In answering the question, I literally just wrote down everything I remembered from the first time because that's all I could honestly remember! I think in another exam question, I ran out of time and only managed to write, what the narrow legal issue was and the rule of law, half a paragraph lol! But other than that I was pretty confident. The detailed answers on the other essay questions and the MPT made up for the two questions I probably didn't answer as well or as detailed as I could have.

Now it was time to go back to the hotel, chill for a bit and do a little more revision, ready for day two which was the the 200 multiple choice questions!

My Journey to the New York Bar - Arriving in Buffalo

I flew out to New York six days before the bar exams so that I would have enough time to shake off the jet lag and have some sort of normal sleeping pattern before exam day arrived!

This time round I was sitting the exams in Buffalo, New York, which is upstate New York, close to Canada. I checked the weather forecast before flying over and saw how cold it was! I took my brother's ski jacket with me! Buffalo really lived up to it's subzero temperatures lol. I spent most of my time in the hotel room and only went outside on the Saturday to find a church nearby that I could attend on Sunday morning and to get food!

When I am visiting a new place, I usually like to do a bit of touring around the neighbourhood and do a bit of retail therapy (and shopping for others) but this time I didn't do any of that! My focus was to nail this exam and spend as much time as the day permitted me to, to study. I was also doing a social media detox at the time so I was not on social media or watching TV. I did watch a few Christian movies in between study breaks but that was about it. I actually spent most of the eight hour flight to New York doing multiple choice and essay practice questions and revising.

On Sunday, I attended a church service about 10 minutes walk from the hotel. It was in a nice close knit suburban area. I was the only person of colour in the congregation which was new for me as my church is the complete opposite. We have people from all walks of life and nations that attend our church, which is very diverse. But I guess the church represented the type of neighbourhood it was located in. The people were very friendly and invited me to have coffee and cake with them after the service in the church hall. I had some really good conversations with them. They were a much older and mature crowd but lovely all the same. From speaking to them, I saw that the congregation was made up of middle class families, most people working in the legal, teaching, medicine, healthcare  profession. They were faithful members who had been attending for over twenty to thirty years. They shared their experiences with me which was nice! I still have the welcome gift they gave me which is a mug, and I use it a lot :)

When I arrived back to the hotel, I started studying again and then realised that I had done NO preparation for the Multistate Performance Test (MPT) which is a section of the exam worth 20% of the overall mark and consists of two 90 minute exercises!! LOL!! By then, the exam was only two days away! I had no choice but to use some of my study time on Sunday evening to go through the MPT. I am going to be honest, I just looked through two MPT example answers and practiced one or two exercises myself and that was it! It actually worked in my favour because the exercises I practiced and looked through, actually came up on the exam, so I sailed through that part! I couldn't believe it, I was so happy. Thank God for that!

Here's a little bit of Buffalo my phone captured and a lovely lady I met called Audrey, after the church service.

My Journey to the New York Bar - Fully focused

In the last few weeks before the bar exams, I literally said no to everything that had nothing to do with preparing me for the exams and anything that wouldn't contribute to my spiritual and general well being. I took the entire month off work (unpaid leave) and cut down on volunteering activities, TV and social media because my focus was preparing myself for the exams.

I didn't care about the fact that I would not be paid for an entire month because my vision and goal for what I wanted to achieve was bigger than those concerns. I didn't think about all the things I was turning down and not being involved in because it wasn't the time for me to be engaged in such things! It was time to put more of my time and effort into preparing for the biggest exams of my life!

I spent a lot of time studying, resting and eating well, having moments to clear my head and to think. Physical, mental, and emotional preparation is so important. Being stressed out and frustrated will not help at all.

When I sat the bar exams for the first time in 2016, I was still keeping up my daily routine and doing all the things I was doing before I started my journey to the bar, which looking back was not wise at all and was one of the reasons why I didn't pass the exams. I wasn't disciplined with my time as I should have been and I was still saying yes to things that really, I knew I shouldn't have said yes to. At times, I would use pre-planned study time to do certain things because I didn't want to say 'no' and thought I could do it all. Big mistake!

During deadlines, crucial moments in our lives, new phases and endeavours we embark on, we will have to say no to things that will not contribute to or keep us in line with what we are doing or where we are going, and that's okay. We may even upset or disappoint people because of it and that's okay too but because we can't please everyone.

My Journey to the New York Bar - Revision revision revision!

I took this photo exactly one month before the February 2017 New York State Bar exam. The closer it got to exam day, the more anxiety seemed to kick in. 

I was still working three days a week, so I had at least 8 hours in the day where I wasn't thinking about the exam. But when evening came, it was time to hit the books again. By this time, I had stopped learning new content. Whatever I knew, I knew and was it was instilled in my brain somewhere and I was holding on to the belief that everything would come flooding back to me when it was time to answer the questions in the exam, (which by the way it did and I even got excited in the exam when I experienced this lol, but I'll delve more into that in a later post).

During the last four weeks leading up to the exam, I focused on strengthening my knowledge on the topics I previously struggled with first time round; tackling any exceptions to rules that I was still unsure about and tightening my essay and multiple choice exam strategies. When there's twelve areas of law which you have to learn for a two day exam, especially when you're re-sitting exams, you really don't want to spend time going over what you already know. It's what you don't know well where your time and effort needs to be spent.

In the multiple choice questions, you know that there are two completely wrong answers. You have to use the power of elimination techniques to eliminate those wrong answers, from reading the closing sentence of the question (and maybe a few sentences above the closing sentence), before you read and analyze the whole question, so that you can narrow it down and focus on the two remaining answers. When you've got 200 fact pattern multiple choice questions to answer (separated by 100 questions in the morning and another 100 questions in the afternoon, in three hour exam segments), time management is everything.

I was constantly doing essay and multiple choice practice questions every other day and reviewing my answers. This was really helpful second time round, as I didn't spend as much time as I could have on practice questions when I sat the bar exams for the first time in 2016.

During the last few weeks, I was still somewhat antisocial, not doing much with others outside of work and studying, but I did spend time in between study breaks to go for walks, exercising, and going to church. Prayer, meditating on the scriptures and being outside around nature kept me sane!

Although it was an intense time, I refused to allow it to completely take over my life, to the point where I may become obsessive about the exams. I had to have a balance and so do you. Get enough sleep (your brain and body needs this), go to the gym (or exercise at home) to let off steam, go for walks, bake, cook, sew, paint or do whatever you find therapeutic and relaxing to help you take your mind off things for a few hours when it gets a little bit too much. When you go back studying, you will feel rejuvenated and have a clearer head to think and absorb more information. You may even see things you didn't notice before.