The bar exam is approaching ever-more rapidly. This past week, I did a simulated, all-day bar exam. If it had been the actual bar exam, I would have passed, albeit not by a wide margin. In the remaining weeks before the exam, my focus is going to be on making a "final push" before the test. The past few weeks have been pretty intense, with lots of studying crammed into days that always seem to end too soon to get it all done. I'm certain that the coming weeks will be quite similar.

Over the past few weeks, I have gotten quite a bit of perspective on NUSL and the ways in which it prepares its students (and sometimes, doesn't prepare its students) for the bar exam. For those readers who will be 1Ls in the fall, I would suggest that you really make sure to enjoy your time as a first year student. It's a special time, and going through a bar review course that focuses on "just the law" has made me appreciate the social justice context that NUSL gave me. I learned "the law," but also gained an appreciation for the ways in which it affects people's lives. I could not imagine being a lawyer without that aspect of my legal education.

Out of all the classes I took at NUSL, my favorites were the ones that were not on bar topics. The classes that I took on bar topics were good, but I think you could learn the "just the law" from BABRI. As most soon-to-be-law students won't know what BABRI is, I guess I should give you some context. The entire bar review review enterprise is quite interesting. It is dominated by one company, BABRI, which runs a two-month bar review program. It's almost entirely conducted via video. As such, I (along with a large majority of the roughly 56,000 bar applicants in the United States) get up each morning and go to an auditorium, where I watch a four-hour DVD with about a hundred other students. It's a surreal experience that makes me yearn for my NUSL days, or, alternately, yearn for the day when I actually begin the practice of law.