noumena (2022-2023)

Honors Program (Thesis)
Rutgers Undergraduate Philosophy Journal (Editor)
Phi Beta Kappa

FOR 2008-2009 CYCLE.

Started undergraduate career at BYU--not a good time there, as I was mired in a year-long's spell of MDD, during which time even my best efforts subsequently weren't able to really mitigate the damage done by my disastrous inaugural semester. Transferred to Rutgers-New Brunswick thereafter, and am on track to graduate summa cum laude. I am taking the February (7) LSAT and will be applying to the above law schools this December. I am a Texas resident and a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I will be keeping track of my progress here from here on out.

1-8-2009: Scored a 165 on a practice LSAT by the LSAC. I'm doing extremely well on the analytical reasoning and reading comprehension sections, but getting consistently flummoxed by the logical reasoning questions. Whereas I'm missing 1-2 questions max on questions from the former, I'm missing almost 30% of the latter. Tip: As obvious as it sounds, I've found it helpful to ignore my own recrudescent doubts as to the mental state of the writers when formulating these questions, especially with regard to their accuracy in using qualifiers such as 'most,' 'the' or 'a', and instead reading them literally and trusting that they know what they're doing. Sigh, sometimes I wish I had't taken that linguistics course--it really makes one doubt how squared any given locution is to its intended meaning. On the other hand, it's made me a much more precise thinker. I still wish I had taken predicate logic last semester instead of spring 2008--those symbolization techniques, a lot of which remains only residually as corrupted memory, may be the difference between a 165 and a 170 score. But that just means I have between now and February 7 to reread that book. Bleh.

2-8-2009: Decided to forebear from taking the LSAT due to timing concerns. Best decision probably for me at the time, but I still think it could only help me. Still haven't completed my logic textbook yet, but after doing multiple LSATs on my own, I feel it's unnecessary. Will use strictly PowerScore's bibles from now on.