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Category Archives: Tamara Toles

Mash Up

It has been almost one birth cycle since I lept from the squishy insides of Vermont Law School.  Life, that’s what’s next. It is a total inversion of the spiritual and ethical soft side. You’ve spent three years connecting your faint imaginings, theories, and academic courage to safe haven solutions and understanding audiences. What should [...]

Impact

It takes a lifetime to make an impact. The duration, in hours and seconds says nothing of the time that goes into making use of ideas, skills and talent. This kind of work isn’t left up to the living. We exist as shiny vessels, waiting to be filled with meaning and experience. Lawyers have access [...]

The staging area

Post bar-August is a month of reclamation.   Thankfully, my sleep patterns have broken down into stretches and excess. Life is larger. The hours left to me are an unusual acquaintance in the absence of drills and testing.  It is a time of adjustment, opposite in every way to the period that preceded it.  This [...]

Eighteen to party

One hundred and seventy hours of classroom instruction are the foundation of your bar exam study programme.  Add hundreds of mnemonics, turned into flash cards that quickly become a full days worth of note review.   Follow with rounds of multiple choice questions and subject matter essay outlines.   It all comes together at the [...]

Readiness

1097.25, days from the start of your 1L year through the end of the 3L term. Three years of procedural and substantive law, policy and ethics training designed to transform you into an advocate. A legal education makes you a lawyer, by shaping your thought processes, questioning and analytical ability, among other things, but you [...]

Of envelopes and entrees

The ceremonies were a blur.  Families,  friends, and benefactors merged into a great sea of awe and encouragement. Vermont Law School puts on a graduation ceremony worthy of your hopes and hours of sacrifice, then sends you off sobbing,  just the way you came.
This last semester of law school was an entangling. The [...]

Recoil

Year three, semester six, forty six days and counting…
I had intended to write about the job search, travel, interviews and the differences between finding a summer position, and a career position. I will in some other posting. Today has its own energy and it will not to be denied.
This semester has been a bitter sweet [...]

2.5

I am law student 2.5.  I live on the edge of the future, rushing deeply into every day coursework, classes, and tradition because it is the end of this thing and the start of another–life.  Good bye Wynterfoest games, hello bar exam application!  This semester, I am taking a mixed bag of courses and [...]

that’s what he said

Words are powerful vehicles. They transport ideas from the imagination to a universe of interpretation.  Words approximate the largeness of experience and make the grand, scale-able.  Language families are like frequencies for the energy bound up in words.  Entrenched consonants and vowels make, break, and remake the mind. They push the invisible into being.
To understand [...]

Access: Cool things law students do

Law school is transformative.  It requires discipline, decisiveness and a sense of time, for the sake of time management.  It sharpens the mind, and reframes big and small questions.  It’s all very self aggrandizing.  That said there are many opportunities for a law student to take all that they have been given and make it [...]