PALS meeting today

Don't forget: PALS general membership meeting Tuesday April 29th at 12:30 in room 118. Food will be provided. Come find out the super-secret scoop on what classes to take next year. Should be helpful for both 1Ls and 2Ls. (3Ls, at least show up for the food, c'mon! and spill the beans on your most parent-friendly courses, of course.)

MAMAS family event Saturday

MAMAS is Mother Attorneys Mentoring Association of Seattle, a great group of lawyers trying to share ideas and network with an emphasis on work-life balance issues. The group has brown bag sessions and that sort of thing, but also gathers monthly with the kids to play and network. (Unfortunately, yes, it's for moms, not dads. Apparently. I could be wrong.) The next one is this coming Saturday:

MAMAS Moms and Kids Networking Event
When: Sat, May 3, 9am – 12pm
Where: The Children's Center at Burke Gilman Gardens, 5251 Sand Point Way NE, Building 5, Seattle, WA
Description: We invite you to attend MAMAS' next monthly mother attorney networking event. Mothers, children, and partners/helpers welcome. Admission is free, and food and beverages will be provided, thanks to our sponsor Williams Kastner.

Go play! If anyone decides to go, let me know how it went.

PALS Meeting April 29th

Hi, we've scheduled a PALS general membership meeting Tuesday April 29th at 12:30 in room 118. Food will be provided. We plan to talk briefly about our upcoming events, including the Work/Life balance panel that we are hosting in combination with Law Women's Caucus on May 14th. Once we get the business out of the way (as quickly as possible), we will be turning the discussion to course selection. 2Ls and 3Ls please come and share your experiences. This will be a good opportunity to get information about which professors pod cast, understand childcare emergencies, or otherwise have child-friendly policies. We hope to see everyone there.
Best Wishes,
Amanda and Christine
(Please note that we will provide more notice and try to avoid Social Justice Tuesdays when scheduling future meetings. Unfortunately, we were bumped from the one other free day that we could find in the next couple of weeks when Academic services decided to reschedule one of their endless (oops, I mean highly useful) academic advising sessions.)

Sack lunch tyranny

Every morning I pack four lunches. Yes I do. I tell you, it's a glamorous life I lead. But here's the thing. After making approximately 1,000 lunches in the last year and a half (yes really), surprisingly enough, it's getting a little old. And not just for me. At first the kids liked PB&Js, and they liked chicken nuggets, and really, they'd eat pretty much anything. I'd slip little notes in there, draw pictures on their lunch bags, yada yada. But now they're surly, jaded 5- and 3-year-olds and they won't eat just any (well-rounded, nutritionally complete, homemade daily) meal. Nuggets, formerly the haute of cuisine, now are gross. Yogurt gives the little one a rash. Perfectly good fruit comes home uneaten.

Here's what I made the last two days, just to make PB&J more attractive:

Yes, these are numerous teeny tiny heart-shaped peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. All part of the scheme to convince my 5-year-old to eat her lunch.

The scheme worked. But here's perhaps a more accurate picture:

Heart-shaped PB&J project aided by Fat Tire; note messy kitchen in background. Not pictured: Unread Torts 2 casebook.

In short, I need ideas. Anybody have sack lunch suggestions? What do you pack in your kids' lunches? Even if you don't pack lunches, got any ideas?

Summer job prep

The law librarians are hosting a program called "Bridging the Legal Research Gap." It's a four-hour program intended to help law students succeed at their summer jobs. I attended after 1L year and found it helpful. Some things I knew, but some I didn't, and there were some practical ideas I found really useful. There are sessions at SU and UW. They are free, though you need to register. If it's after your job starts, some employers will happily give you the afternoon off so you can attend.
The UW session is:
Tuesday, June 24, 200812:45 - 5pm,University of Washington School of Law
For more info and to register:
http://lib.law.washington.edu/btg/2008/register.htm
Oh, um, snacks are provided. Not that that should influence you.

Blog-o-rama, or, we all need distractions

One of my favorite bloggers is on a road trip around the country, visiting her readers and fellow bloggers, so I stopped by to have coffee with her on Tuesday when she was in Seattle. It was fun to meet her and a couple of other bloggers in person.

I tend to read parenting blogs (sometimes called "mommy blogs") because reading other parents' stories about dealing with kid and family problems sometimes helps me with my own, or at least puts a little perspective on mine. Then there are the humor blogs, the catty fashion blogs, the (gasp) legal blogs... Do you read any blogs, and if so, which ones?

Here are a few that I visit occasionally:

Humor/parenting blogs
dooce
thepioneerwoman
whoopee
iambossy
the bloggess
othejoys

finslippy

alladither

snarky blogs
mamapop -- pop culture from a mom's perspective!
gofugyourself
I used to read more of these -- what's good?

law blogs
trialadnotes -- holla, mary!
Decision of the day

What else? What great blogs did I leave out?

Lisa and Bossy of iambossy

I like this better than my pix from prom this weekend, sigh

PALS is student org of the year!

At the law school gala on Saturday night, Megan Vogel of the SBA announced that we won student organization of the year! Megan cited our leadership on Fall Festival, our support of the Athay scholarship, and... well it was hard to hear, but it was a very nice speech, thanks Megan! I'd be happy to provide a copy of our nomination letter to anyone who wants it. It's a little long to post here. We also talked about the blog, the Childhaven drive, and our efforts to raise awareness of work/life balance issues.

Congrats everyone!

Legislative update

Well, Gov. Gregoire cut the increased funding for student-parents that we were so excited about. Thanks again to Dave, Laura and Michael who worked so hard on it. 2Ls and 1Ls, think about testifying in Olympia next year and the year after in support of increased funding for children of students!

Bar exam info

Just a reminder for 3Ls: Bar exam applications must be postmarked by April 23. The application and other info are here: http://www.wsba.org/lawyers/licensing/bar_exam_app_info.htm

Hello prospective students

Hey prospective students!
We get a lot of the same type of questions from students who are considering going to law school, whether they’ve already been admitted or are thinking of applying. I’ve written up the same kind of note several times so I thought I’d just post it here for folks who come wandering by.

The questions:

- How many hours a week can I expect class and homework to fill?
- Is it possible to take summer classes to lighten the load from the school year?
- Should my husband and I try to have our second child before fall 2009? Or wait til during law school? Am I crazy to even be contemplating this?

The answers: And remember, this is only my perspective on these things, but formed on the basis of talking to lots of people over the nearly 3 years I’ve been here.

hours per week:
The Bar and professors expect that your study time should be about two hours for every hour you’re in class. You’ll average 15 hours of class time per quarter, so another 30 hours of study time per week. I have found that unlike undergrad, this is real study time. Just to keep up. Your young, beer-drinking, childless classmates (I love them!) have vast expanses of time in which to study, and they will. It’s ALWAYS possible to study more, and the people who do are the ones with the great grades. However, 30 is enough. Unfortunately, 30 is a lot. It’s hard to find study time during the school day – if you have an hour between classes, it’s nice to study, but often you just want to zone out for a minute. Then there’s commuting, life, etc. My 1L year I did the bulk of my studying on weekends: eight hours on Saturdays and 4-8 on Sundays. (This is largely because I commute 3-4 hours a day, which hopefully most people don't.). Some weeks were lighter. If a paper was due, it was worse, but that only happens a couple times in the first year.

The second year seems a lot easier, though the work load isn’t lighter. There’s more of a variety of things you get into, and you can choose what you get into, so it seems more fun (or less painful), but there’s still a lot of work. People often try to time having their babies between first year and second year, or after second year. It’s still hard, but you have more choices about what to do, and you know better what level of work you want to put into it. First year really is boot camp, and you need all the focus you can get (within reason).

summer classes:
You can take summer classes. There is a full slate offered. There are two aspects of your question. One is, yes, you can take summer classes and lighten the load. An alternative would be to do an externship for credit (you can, for example, earn 15 credits – a full quarter’s worth – over the summer by working for a judge, and it looks awesome on your resume too). The downside of both the classes and the externship is that you have to pay full tuition for the summer. If you use your credits to lighten the load, you’ll have to still pay full tuition for the rest of school as well, because there’s no discount until you get to a really low credit load. So you’d be out another $5K and whatever else. That’s not actually a huge amount in the perspective of law school debts, but something to keep in mind.

The other aspect is that summer is such a great time to go out and exercise your legal skills. Pretty much everyone finishes their first year and thinks, great, I feel like I’ve learned a lot but what use is it? Your summer job or externship is incredibly helpful in making you realize you do have marketable skills, are good at this, and there is a point to going to law school. It’s really good for staving off a, for lack of a better term, crisis of faith. If you start wondering why the heck you’re doing this.

In addition, and this is where the law school voodoo kicks in, the first summer job is a great thing to have on your resume to land your second-summer job. The second-summer job is crucial because for a lot of people, at the end of their second-summer job, they get a job offer for after graduation. Not everyone. But a lot of people. That’s the, hmmm, track. The road that people try to get onto. So, the first summer, you want to have something on your resume that makes it look like you did something somewhat ambitious. A paying legal job would be great, but exceedingly rare. An externship is fantastic. A non-paying legal job is good. Somewhere after those is taking classes – it’s good, it’s legal, but it’s less of an effort to apply your skills and see how you do.

If you were to have a baby, most employers understand about that – they have babies too. So, say you had a baby your 1L summer, you could pretty much take the summer off and get a job as a research assistant for a professor, and find a professor that’s understanding about your schedule. Something where you could do a pretty minimal amount of work, but you still kept your toe in the pool. That would look great on an application for a 2L summer job. One of my friends did exactly that and got her first-choice 2L summer job.

(Just to finish off the train of thought, the only thing you don’t want to do your 1L summer is 1. nothing at all (although even that is ok if there’s a baby involved) or 2. go back to your old job because it looks like you’re not really interested in the law.)

timing of second child:
I started with a 9-month-old (and a 3-year-old) and that was doable. There are a couple of 1Ls this year who started with even younger babies. I wouldn’t recommend that though. I think you want your child to be old enough that you’re comfortable with having them in day care, and you’re familiar with the day care routine. A friend started at the same time as me with 8-month-old twins and that was fine – she had been accepted the year before, but deferred a year when she found out she was pregnant.

Older would be ok too, but I have found that this year, my 5-year-old is more interfering with my studies than in past years. I’m glad I didn’t wait until she was much older than 3 when I started.

One caveat. First year is tough, stressful, sometimes emotional. Having a baby your 1L summer is ideal, but it means spending most of your 1L year pregnant. Which can add to the stress and emotion. Shouldn't stop you, but something to consider.

(I don't really expect any current students to have read this far, but if you have, feel free to add your perspective in the comments!)

Legislative success

Thanks to Laura Arras and Michael Sterner who helped out with the lobbying effort in Olympia this year, and especially Dave Brown, 3L and GPSS president. They got us more money! Here's Dave's description:

GPSS Wins Major Victory for Student Parents; Securing One Million Dollars for Childcare
GPSS and the Washington Student Lobby secured a one million dollar increase in childcare grants for student parents statewide, and the passage of legislation to make the allocation of those grants more predictable and equitable. Grants will now be allocated on a basis proportionate to the contribution made by student governments at each of Washington’s four-year schools. Because over $800,000 of our student dollars are dedicated to childcare grants annually, this increase means that next year over one million dollars will go to UW student parents. This increased funding will allow graduate and professional student parents greater access to quality childcare and ensures that childcare is and remains affordable to our student community.

Missing tree

I just noticed that the Ben tree is missing from its spot. Wha? Perhaps you noticed this long before me. Rike reassured me: "A water pipe underneath it broke, and it is safe in the nursery. it will be put back soon--I hope!"