Thanksgiving Weekend

Hey everyone, I hope you all were able to enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday. Personally, I’ve always loved Thanksgiving weekend. Not only is it a great day to indulge a bit in some of your favorite dishes, drinks, and desserts, but more importantly it’s also an opportunity for many of us to see our families, friends, classmates, and significant others to reflect on the past year and spend a moment or two thinking about being thankful. For some of us students, it may seem like it's a bit more difficult be thankful for with the current unemployment rates, deferrals being handed out by firms, and final exams lingering, but the mere fact that you’re sitting on a computer reading my page, aside from all the basic things like having a good meal, suggests that we have a lot to be thankful for. Definitely something to think about for students as grades and recruiting results play out over the next few weeks, for applicants as you start to hear back from graduate school programs that you've been dying to get into, and for everyone else as you’re trying survive these odd economic times.

While the Thanksgiving holiday brought a nice long weekend getaways for many folks out there, here in law school some (though not all) of my classmates decided to stay local, given that we’ll all be going home in just a couple of weeks after finals anyhow. Many of the folks here had small gatherings near campus. Some went out to the suburbs to visit friends from Chicago or to see family there. Other folks who typically don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, just had a normal day of relaxing and studying.

As for me, this year, I spent the weekend here in Chicago, given that finals begin fairly soon. My thought was that taking 3 or 4 days completely off would be a bit imprudent, especially considering that I don't tend to get much done when I head home for holiday breaks, and that a good number of friends would be around in Chicago anyhow. So on my Thanksgiving, I actually did a lot of reading yesterday afternoon, had dinner with an old college buddy and his family just outside the city, and capped off the night by spending some quality time chatting with a friend afterward. I plan to use the rest of the weekend to do some reading, outlining, and studying.

It’s hard to believe but next week will be the last week of classes in my first semester of law school. It’s funny how fast it feels time is going by here. Most people here are ready for the semester to be over, but I suspect the next three weeks will feel really long, perhaps just as long as the first twelve weeks felt. In fact, I like to think of it like running a mile marathon. And just because you've run 23 of the 26 miles already, doesn't mean you can just take off and sprint the last 3 miles. Even the fastest runner still has to pace himself and manage his energy, so that he can finish as strong as possible. But either way, should be a pretty interesting process to through my first law school exam period, and probably a lot of fun that night once we all finish. But for now, time to get back to the books.