It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye…

Last weekend I finally resigned myself to cleaning out some of my old school materials from the garage.  I kept most of this stuff in case I needed it, but since my official motto with respect to bar exams is “NEVER AGAIN” (that’s emphatic, mind you), I officially had no reason to keep all of my law materials.  Now, I definitely saved most of my textbooks (a lawyer needs law books on her bookshelves, right?) and did hold on to a few choice items that I might actually use in my practice.  But, it was time to say goodbye to the rest of it. 

You probably think I’m crazy for having any sort of sentimentality attached to school materials, but this stuff represents A LOT of work and that work is hard to just toss out.  For anyone who ever sat beside me in a class in undergrad or grad school, you know my system revolved around these binders.  These binders, at least theoretically, held all of the answers – the syllabus, class notes, PowerPoint slides, old notes and outlines, practice questions, old exams, etc.  I won’t use the word lovingly, but they were painstakingly made, especially those for law school.  I was not a gunner or at the top of my class by any means, but you have to admit these binders were top-notch.  I mean, just check out this tabbed awesomeness:

I need to document this hard work in some way, and since I can’t hold on the binders forever, I’ll just have to blog about them.

I’d also held on to some of my papers from the infamous GBA 490:

In case you can’t read them from my exam, here are the five themes from that semester’s GBA course:

1.  It’s better to be a weed in Costa Rica than a flower in Hawaii.
2.  Enjoy the leaves, but nurture the roots.
3.  I am who I am because it’s who I want to be.  I am where I am because it’s where I want to be.  Don’t take the monkey.
4.  Play the hand you’re dealt, but play it to the best of your ability.
5.  The coin of business has two sides:  strategy and people.

Thanks, Dr. Dulek (my favorite professor), for being an amazing teacher.

Important business school lessons, but also important life lessons.  And from my later MBA class with Dr. Dulek, whose praise always meant a lot to me (not trying to “toot my own horn” here, but just wanted to preserve this for posterity – I couldn’t just throw them away):

There were a lot of memories tied to these binders and the classes I made them for.  Right, Catherine?  Lauren?  Shelley?  Beth?  Section 3?  It wasn’t all a terror.

But who gets the Winnebago?

By the end of my cleaning rampage, I’d emptied 20+ binders (which I hope to find a good home for soon – let me know if anyone out there is interested in taking them off my hands).  Goodbye hard work!  Goodbye hours spent in the basement of Bidgood!  Goodbye spent highlighters!  Goodbye color-coded tabs!  Goodbye dangerously heavy boxes of binders that have followed me from city to city over the last few years!