Law Review Write-On

Friday afternoon I pulled open the heavy door to Student Services and walked in, paper in hand.  I had a flashback to October 2002, when I first entered this office with my application form, resume and personal statement.  At the time I was pretty nervous because I knew there was so much competition for admission to law school.  It can be pretty intimidating to reduce your academic and professional life to a series of bullet points to be scrutinized and possibly rejected.   I spent hours putting it together, and went through several revisions of my personal statement.  If I'd have known then that there were something like 900 applicants, I probably would have obsessed over it even more.  I remember when I handed my application folder to the secretary, she took it and threw it into a pile.  I just stood there, expecting her to say something, give me a receipt, anything.  After all the time and effort and worry that went into preparation, the delivery seemed so. . . hard.  It's like dropping off your child at daycare for the first time.  "Take care of my baby!" 
 
Fast forward 18 months, and again I'm submitting an application.  This one is a write-on application for Law Review.  Making Law Review is an achievement that carries high esteem in the legal community,  and for the past three weeks I've been researching and thinking about little else.  Those who wanted to apply had to write a casenote about a case coming up before the Supreme Court this Fall.  Requirements: 20-30 pages, 50% footnotes.  Every comma and period of every footnote must conform to the Bluebook of legal form.  Ugh.  Three weeks of research, stress and sweat later, I am again handing in my work to an indifferent office assistant, and again I find it hard to walk away.  However, with each step taken back towards my car, the burden of the paper lifted more and more, until by the time I drove away all the stress had been displaced by relief that it was finished.
 
Several of us met up at a party put on by our Property professor.  We stood around and talked about our papers.  Someone said we shouldn't be so obsessive about it, but I argued we needed to talk to just decompress and get back into the real world. 
 
If I make it they'll call me in about a week.  If I don't, I'm doing the International Journal.   In short, this is my first post that ends: TO BE CONTINUED.