If you have followed the blog since its inception, you probably already knew that this week was exam week for me. Add in a sick girlfriend in the hospital (note: she’s ok), work, LSAT, and finishing my last essay and I have been slightly out of commission for the past 14-odd hours. I tried to go into work, but I was just delirious and useless, so I ended up leaving early and falling back asleep.

When I get my grades back at the end of the semester, they are usually bittersweet for me. With all the hours that I work and the back-and-forth schedule that I operate on, I am generally glad to see that I have passed as class regardless of the grade as reflection upon the class generally yields a blur. USF operates on the plus/minus scale, which is a dual-edged sword in terms of GPA. For example… to receive an A, you have to receive a score ranging from 100 to 95. Anything in the 94.999 to 93 range, would be an A- meaning that you would not receive a 4.0 for the class’s grade. I realize that some universities have their plus/minus setup differently, but that is what I am dealing with for the moment. So I receive my professional writing grade and I have done generally well on the four projects that make up the entire grade for the semester; in fact, my lowest grade on any of the projects was a 92 with the highest grade being a 96. I looked at my grade and see the following: 94.8 (A-). I can’t really be upset about it, but I am a little annoyed by the grade.

Harping on it, though, won’t yield a different result. I just have to deal with what I have been dealt, do the best I can on the LSAT and see if/where I can get into a college. Being in college as long as I have (read: seven years) has not been kind to my GPA; my focus was always on work and it hasn’t been until recently that I truly cared about the difference between a C and a B or a B and an A. I realize there are applicants with far better GPAs, but I hope to balance some of that out with my resume, which is far better than your typical college graduate. I have almost a decade of experience in the entertainment industry with more than 7 years as a manager, so I think that is a little in my favor. I don’t know if it is enough to classify me as a “Non-Traditional Applicant,” but I will accept that if it does. I also have the Under Represented Minority card to play (read: African-American) which I’ll gladly accept. I know the URM status for applicants is a heavily criticized topic and I guess my main argument against it follows something like this:

I don’t care. I don’t care if it stays and I don’t care if it goes. If they are offering it, though, and I am eligible for its classification, then I’ll gladly accept it.

Grad school is just too important not to take every opportunity offered to differentiate yourself from the next candidate. If they offered better acceptance rates for “people who wear flip-flops more often than they wear sneakers,” I would accept that as well.

Thursday is my last exam and then I’ll have a whole week off before I begin my summer courses. It feels like a long time since I have had a “week off.” Even though I will still be working during that time and in reality it will just mean I will have more work that I had to do, it will still be nice to turn off part of my brain and focus on one task for once. I started to receive the emails telling me the deadlines to declare for graduation; receiving these emails is a little surreal for me. It might be hard to understand but at times it seemed like I would never finish. When you are sleeping in the back of a utility van following a band around for months, you find a lot of time to be pensive. I absolutely love being on tour; it definitely is one of my favorite experiences. Being away from a loved one, if you are so lucky to have someone, is the hardest part but the comradeship, travel and experiences make up for it. I wish I would have taken more pictures the last time I was out, but I was too busy working. For you bands out there, if you are looking for a road manager to work for cheap, get a hold of me and we will work something out if the times match up.

I think after graduation (which I will not be walking at because it makes me feel old) I am going to try to take some time off. Not too much time but a few days or a week. I have been trying to get over to wine country and I think the girlfriend could use it as well. It is kind of crazy to consider how much of an impact this one little test has upon my life. I like to plan out things in my future, but I constantly find myself saying “well, we will see how I do on my LSAT and I’ll make my decisions from there.” At time I wish the test was two more months away and at times I wish that it was tomorrow. I know it will be upon us relatively soon and then the waiting game will begin. I think that will be quite the period of insanity, filled with many a sleepless nights.

This weekend will also serve as the first time I begin working on my update to the LSAT Cacophony. I don’t want to announce too much about it, but if I can pull it off it could be a lot of fun. I know that some of you already know about it, so I will go ahead and set an announcement date. I will make a post about the update very soon after the June LSAT.