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.