Law Review Competition

This is about 2 weeks late, but here are my fond memories of the law review write on competition.

My school allows the top 5% to grade on, but no matter your grades, you must make a good faith effort and suffer through the write on competition. We were able to pick up our packets the Monday after finals. To add insult to injury, it cost $25 for the privilege of participating. We had two weeks to write our article and do our cite check assignment (Blue Book even though the school does not use Blue Book for the writing classes -- more brilliance).

Day 1: Picked up packet, went out to lunch with a friend, read about 100 pages
Day 2: Read the rest of the packet (It was over 200 pages), Picked topic
Day 3: Took notes
Day 4: Stared blankly at my computer screen as I sat by the pool, finally wrote a paragraph
Days 5-9: Went on vacation, did 1/2 of the cite check assignment (much time spent whining because citations gave no indication of what source they were supposed to represent)
Day 10: Wrote paper
Day 11: Wrote paper again
Day 12: Finished paper
Day 13: Took the day off, went to orientation for my summer job
Day 14: Edited paper, finished cite check assignment, put citations in the paper in proper format.
Day 15: Made photocopies and put them in envelopes, dropped off my packet, went home to work on research project for my summer job. (Yes. The fun never ends.)

I have no idea when we hear back about the competition, but I feel like I managed to do a fairly decent job. My only word of advice is that everything took longer than I thought. (For example, putting my footnotes in proper format took more than 4 hours.) So allot more time than you think is necessary to get the paper put together and edited and whatnot.