Hello from the beautiful mountain town of Missoula, Montana!

When things change, they really change, don’t they? Two weeks ago I was still living in D.C. and sightseeing with friends. One week ago I began a 24-hour drive from Chicago to Montana. And this Friday finds me in Missoula attending Bar/Bri lectures and studying for the bar. I don’t know whether to feel lucky, crazy, stupid, or all of the above.

The short-as-I-can-make-it story of what I’m doing here: Two weeks ago I explained my bar review situationââ�¬â��MT Bar/Bri does not offer any self-study options other than books alone. You can either study the books on your own, or study the books plus attend classes in Missoula at the only law school in Montana. Those are your options. After talking to everyone I could about this, the consensus was that the classes are pretty important and would make studying much easier, but since the classes were a 5-hour drive from my new home in Billings, I thought I’d just try to make it w/out them. Then I got the books and started looking at them and could tell right away that trying to make sense of all that info on my own was going to be a huge task. Plus, another piece of advice I’ve often heard about the bar exam is that it’s important to do whatever you need to do to make sure you walk into the exam feeling confident and ready and like you did all you could or needed to do to be prepared. That way, you’ll be able to perform your best w/out getting psyched out. That makes sense to me and I realized that if I just studied on my own I’d walk into the exam wondering what I’d missed in the classes and second-guessing all my preparation. So I called Missoula, rented a “dorm” room, and headed to class.

Before making the decision to “move” to Missoula for 7 weeks, I did look for alternatives and learned three interesting things:

1. There is no “national” Bar/Bri office. If you call the Bar/Bri general 800-number you get the Illinois state office and all they can really tell you is what they do in Illinois.
2. I could have gotten multistate iPod audio materials from some other state (i.e., Illinois) for about $1100; however, I would miss about 5 Montana-specific lectures that might be pretty important. I’m paying only about $800 to live in Missoula for 6-7 weeks, plus I get all the Montana-specific stuff, so it’s a hassle, but maybe better this way. I think/hope.
3. MT has no iPod option b/c the local Bar/Bri director has decided it’s too expensive and his primary goal is to keep the cost of the class at about $1000. MT Bar/Bri students also don’t get several multistate books that most other Bar/Bri students get b/c, again, the local Bar/Bri director has decided they’re not necessary and b/c they are expensive. Two of the books we don’t get are the “Practice Book” or “MPQ,” which has bunches of practice MBE questions, and the “Exam Book” or “MSE,” which contains simulated exams to practice on. Considering that the most common piece of advice I’ve heard about studying for the bar exam is that doing practice questions is the best way to study, these books seem like they would be pretty important, don’t they? I’m trying not to be uptight about this, though, by reminding myself that no one else taking Bar/Bri here will have the benefits of these books, either, so perhaps we’ll enter the exam on a level field. If I find I need extra practice questions I bet ebay could help me out…

So far the classes do seem to be living up to their billing as very helpful. I’ve only attended two so far (I missed the first two days, unfortunately), but both helped condense all the info on their topic into a much more clear and manageable order than I would ever have been able to pull out of the outlines on my own. So it’s lonely here, but worthwhile so far. Speaking of which, I better review some CrimPro before class…

This entry was posted on Friday, June 9th, 2006 at 8:44 am and is filed under Bar exam. It has had 284 views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response here, send a trackback from your own site, or rate this post right here: