I sat in the front row and answered all the questions. It was like Jeopardy. Sometimes, I shut my mouth so others could get a word in edgewise. But I was in heaven. I have never felt more in love with school than when I was a paralegal student. I loved and respected my professors. Most of my colleagues went on to law school and became lawyers. I was too afraid. I once asked a lawyer friend how long it took him to brief cases, and he said it took about two hours. I would spend weeks and then another week or two drafting memoranda. But, when I asked my friend, an attorney with a 180 IQ and a photographic memory, what he thought of a case, he came up with what I thought was an irrelevant conclusion. It gave me pride that I had understood the issues well. If you put me alone in a room to work on one prominent case, I could figure it out and provide the best argument. When I worked at the Prosecuting Attorneys Office, I dreamed of working in the Appellate Department because they sat in the library in their little respective corners and worked on appeals. When I was young, I once wrote a piece on White Collar Crime, and the White Collar Department Head suggested I submit it to a law journal. I felt I was too young and didn't take him seriously. But, looking back, I should have. The thesis was cutting-edge. When computers and so forth were coming on the scene, prosecutors didn't know how to prosecute offenders in "white collar crime," but fraud was fraud, and theft was theft, no matter the tools. I had 45 footnotes, pages of sources, and access to FBI material. The piece was 22 pages. In rereading it, it still seems relevant. My Legal Research Final Exam project was over 100 pages.

I also created a database on the office main frame that organized all the appellate cases so that the attorneys could find cases like their own. And I made a database for an agency within the office that needed stats to get funding.