life of andyman

6 (almost 7) months in review!!!

July: This month, so long ago and cloudy in my memory, saw me go back to my summer camp for a two week visit. It was awesome as usual. Well…mostly awesome. I did have a lot of trouble with a particular camper. I kept thinking, “Man…I’m only here for two weeks, so why’d I get stuck with THIS kid?!” But in my two weeks I did the best I could to do all my favorite stuff, but instead of having the whole summer to get it done, I stuffed it into two weeks.

August: The big news from this month was having no job and no worthwhile ambition, living in Noblesville and whittling away at my savings. But I did get an acceptance letter to law school, which will become the big news next month.

September: I moved away from Noblesville and into an apartment in Indianapolis. It was a very fortunate circumstance. I had been searching endlessly on the OneStart and Craigslists posts for a good roommate to live with in Indy, without much hope or excitement: in my mind I expected to get some quiet, boring kid who never left his room. In fact, I think the person I imagine when I think of a random roommate is actually Keith’s roommate when he lived in Teter at IU. At the time, Keith was called “Casey”.

So there I was, looking for roommates, when I get an e-mail from a guy I had met in Bloomington and hadn’t seen in over a year: Adam Ploshay. Funny story: the place I met him was that he was the instructor of my LSAT prep class at IU. This is interesting because I don’t think he ever took the LSAT and he’s certainly not in or planning to go to law school. Another funny story: I had already taken the LSAT and gotten literally the national average score of 154. Then, I decided to re-take it, but first to take this prep class. Adam has since said that he feels guilty that after I took his prep course, when I re-took the exam I got the exact same score.

Anyway, I’m looking for a roomate and Adam sends this e-mail, “Hey all my friends from Indiana!  I’m back from Istanbul where I’ve been travelling for a year!”  I write him back, and find out he’s temporarily with his parents and looking for a place to live in Indianapolis.  Geez.  Anyway, now we’re roommates, and Adam’s awesome, and the arrangement is working out very well.  Check out our apartment on Google Maps Street View by typing in our address: 2001 N. Talbott, 46202.  (It’s the brick one with the big columns!)

October: I forget when exactly law classes started, but I’m going to write about them here. Let me start by saying that I highly recommend being an evening student. It’s great! I have ONE class a day, from 5:30 pm -7:30 pm. That’s not bad, people! I would say that, on average, I study two hours for each class, so 4 hours a day are spent on academics. This is perfect for me: I think I understand why people think Law school is so hard–it’s because the full-time students have 2, sometimes 3 classes a day, which means they’re spending 8 or MORE hours just studying law. That’s too much, right?

Law School is different from all prior education I’ve had in my life. For one, there are *no assignments*. Every day you are responsible for about 15-20 pages of *reading only*. You never have to hand in your answer to a study question, never have to give a speech, never have to do a (tremble) group project, never have to design a powerpoint presentation or tri-fold science-fair display presentation. No: all you do is read and show up. There’s one grade in the whole semester–your final exam.

This sounds worse than it is. You might think–you mean it’s all on the line for a single exam? What if I mess up on the exam? They gave us two, almost three weeks without any class and without any new material in order to study, so the only way I can think of to “screw up” on the exam is to not study at all for it.

Also, there’s this weird grading thing that I still don’t fully understand… I think it goes something like this…The number of B+ though A must equal or exceed 20%, the number of C+ through B must equal or exceed 45%, and the number of F through C- must *not* exceed 15%. So, here’s the application: all you have to do is be better than the bottom 15% of the class, and you have succeeded, no matter how poorly you have done. Yeah, maybe you won’t get the $100,000 job right out of law school like those kids that manage to get straight As in law school, but you’ll definitely pass, graduate, and get a job by simply not being the worst 15% of the class. Weird.

By the way, I will get my first semester’s grades now in about one week! I’ll try to post them!

Also in October I happened across Brad Woolems, and together we competed in an IUPUI Cornhole Tournament. We were called the “A-Maize-ing Corn-Holy Rollers”. To get the name I went to punoftheday.com and did a search on all puns having to do with corn. haha. We beat one team, and the second team beat us (but only by a ridiculously lucky turn where one of the opponents inexplicably got like 11 points on his turn). There was a team at the tournament called “The We Hate Tom Bradys”. I was rooting for them after we lost.

November: I don’t really remember anything about this month. I happen to know that my Birthday occurs in November, though. Oh–yeah, I had a “game party” for my birthday, and it was great. We played the drawing game (sentence-fold-picture-fold), catch-phrase, …and other games like that.

Oh yeah! Here’s something else that happened, and it may have happened in November. I got a part-time job. So now I’ve got a part-time job, and part-time school. It works out great because I’m not doing the same thing all day, all week. I’ve got some variety, you know, so I don’t get sick of either thing.

I only work 16 hours a week at the IUPUI Center For Teaching and Learning. This is an office at IUPUI that helps faculty and professors to innovate their teaching methods and strategies. There’s two main services the office provides: Instructional Design (meaning it helps the teachers with course design, keeping their kids engaged, using unique and interesting styles and methods of teaching) and then there’s also Instructional Technology (meaning it helps the teachers use technology in their instruction…like a teacher might say, “I want to make my lecture into a podcast online!” or “I don’t know how to animate my powerpoint presentation!” and we help them do those sorts of things.)

I was hired to the Instructional Technology half, and I was hired as a “video specialist”. Now anytime a faculty member wants to use video in their class, they make appointments with me. It’s a great job!

PLUSSES OF THE JOB:

–I get to work with computers and video–which I like and am good at–but I don’t just sit in front of a computer all day by myself–I work with a faculty-person and teach them face-to-face (much less boring!).

–Also, the other people in the office are totally awesome, and I get along with them really well–much better than the couple of people at my old video job. I’ve already got a group of friends at the office, including my new boss, Tom, who is awesome and totally nice and who plays a really badass bass guitar.

–Because the office is at IUPUI, they’re super-flexible about allowing me time off in order to accommodate my classes. For instance, I just got the whole week off before my CivPro final, and they were totally ok with it.

–Also because the office is at a university, there’s strange things that I’ve never encountered before at any other job. It’s an educational institution, so their goal isn’t to make money! I’ve never worked at a place before that wasn’t trying to earn a profit. Instead, the goal is development and improvement of the faculty at IUPUI! The best part of this works like this: if we don’t have appointments with faculty, we are encouraged and expected to learn something new. I mean, at any other job, if you don’t have a client, that’s when you start doing busy work, like cleaning the place, restocking the whatevers, marketing in order to get more clients, or whatever other unenjoyable stuff you can think of. But at this job, if I don’t have an appointment I can say, “I think I’d like to learn Flash, so that if a faculty member needs help with flash, I’ll be able to know what they’re talking about–and because I’ve always wanted to learn flash anyway.” I have spent some time at my job, for instance, playing on Second Life–that online virtual world you hear about in the news–because you could potentially hold distance education courses online in Second Life spaces (and because I was getting paid to mess around with, essentially, a video game).

–MINUSES OF MY JOB AND MY LAW SCHOOL

–One is that occasionally at the job where I help faculty with computers, well, sometimes you get a faculty person that’s like, “Hey, I don’t know jack crap about computers, but I want to produce a 10-minute video about tips on investing, for my Finance class.” And I’m like, “Wait, so you need explanation about what a ‘double-click’ is, but you expect me to be able to teach you how to do advanced video-editing?” Here’s a good example of what can sometimes be frustrating–there was a teacher who had recorded a speech she gave, and now she wanted to post the video online. She regretted not asking the class to move to the front seats, because in the video it looks like she’s giving her speech to 4 uninterested people. She honestly asked me this, and I am not making it up: “Is there any way [using video editing] that we can make it look like there are more people in the audience?”

No, ma’am, there is not.

–A Minus of my part-time job, part-time school schedule. I really like the shedule I have going now, as I told you, but there is one drawback. I have class EVERY weeknight from 5:30-7:30, and I usually don’t get home until 8. The problem is that I can’t join any clubs or any groups because every club just about meets at 6 or 7 at night. I can’t do any intramural sports, can’t attend any weekly meetings of choirs or caving clubs or evening Ultimate Frisbee games. That’s too bad…

December: The big news in December was the final exams. We did get 2 weeks with no classes in order to study, so there was no shortage of opportunity to study. The exams were kindof intense, I have to admit, because each of my two exams was 4 hours long. They were also both essay exams. What they do is give you a “fact pattern” (a hypothetical client’s problem). Like, for my contracts class, two business people meet at a restaurant to discuss a contract. Business person #2 gets a phone call and says, “I have to go, emergency at the plant! But I don’t want to lose your business, so let me write down what we talked about.” So he grabs a napkin and jots down, “My company to manage your apartment complex next July, the usual services. Tom Jenkins.”

Then, in your essay, you have to discuss whether or not this napkin note is a binding contract, because July comes around, and Tom doesn’t manage the apartment complex. He argues, “What?! That wasn’t a binding contract, I just wrote down a summary of our discussion!” But the first person says, “But you signed it and everything, now I’m going to lose a whole bunch of money because I thought I had a manager but it turns out I don’t! You owe me because I relied on your promise!”

And so on. You write in your essay all about whether the contract is binding or not, and whether either person has to pay the other as a result of breaching the contract.

Also in December I went to Ohio to visit Morgan and had an awesome New Years celebration with her and her friends playing games like Catchphrase, guitar hero, ping pong, and clue. I love group games, now, by the way–that’s a new thing with me that I talk about a lot.

January: So now I’m all caught up, right? It’s mid-January and not much has happened. on January 10 it was Morgan’s birthday, and it was a huge success, if you ask me. She decided to have her party at La Charreada in Bloomington, and, no joke, 30 people showed up! I’ve never had that many people celebrate my birthday! It was also great to have it at the restaurant because she didn’t have to pay for everyone’s food or drinks, and she didn’t have to clean up. High Five, Mo!

Also, last week I joined the Indianapolis YMCA and I think after I write this post, I’m going to go for a swim

So, we’ll see if I keep this blogging thing up, or not. The problem is I spend so much time in front of computers that when I have free time, the last thing I want to do is get in front of a computer again and write a blog post.

But I am glad to finally change my blog, because for the past 7 months, any curious visitors to my site got to read “My Job And How I Lost It” so that they instantly think I’m a bum. Now they can read about how I’m a law school student, so take that! Alright, see ya!