This past Saturday, after months of preparation and anxiety, I made my first attempt at the dreaded LSATs. In a perfect world where hard work and dedication actually pay off, it’ll be my only attempt — but that remains unknown until the scores come back.

In the meantime, I can finally sit back and reflect on the whole experience, and as usual for overly analytical people like myself, reflection usually results in even more questions and concerns.

The first big issue I have about this whole graduate/professional school entrance testing process is the amount of stress it places on undergraduates. True, stress is nothing new for college students, but add the stress of what is potentially the most important exam of your life to the regular stress of classes, projects, midterms and extracurricular involvement and you’ve got a serious stress overload.

And let’s be honest — the majority of students applying to law school are probably those same students who already take a lot onto their plate to begin with. Now they have to study for this test — which is completely unrelated to their courses — while still striving for an A on that paper, creating meeting agendas for the organizations they lead and writing riveting columns for the school newspaper. Et cetera, et cetera.

Add to that the fact that the LSATs are only offered four times a year — three of which fall around typical college midterm weeks — and it’s enough to make you go crazy.

Now we all know that stress isn’t healthy. It can make you depressed, affect your appetite, damage your relationships, lead to sleep problems and more. I realized something else about stress, though: It seems like students are either under a ton of it or none at all. So you have a group of robust, healthy students whose only real worry is going to class that day and another group of students (ironically, usually the student leaders who are responsible for a lot around the campus) whose health is compromised as a result of their good efforts. We’re essentially harming and disadvantaging ourselves in choosing to pursue things that will (hopefully) benefit us — what a catch-22!

Another thing I realized after my whole LSAT ordeal is how broke I’m going to be in a few years. You may be thinking, “You won’t be broke; you’ll be a lawyer,” but unfortunately, that’s not the case. See, it costs a pretty penny to even get that far. First, it costs more than $130 to even take the LSATs. And many people take prep classes before the exam that can cost upward of $1,000. You might see that as superfluous, but when other young people are getting an advantage from taking a course, you’d want that same advantage in order to level the playing field.

And we haven’t even reached the expensive part yet: tuition. I had a bit of a heartbreaking moment at the law school fair a few weeks ago upon seeing the price of my “dream” school: $78,000. Per year. And that’s a public institution.

So again for law school, students have basically the same predicament they did when applying to college. You can go somewhere you really deserve and want to attend based on your achievement but be in debt up to your eyeballs, or settle for a scholarship to your “safety school” or something cheaper with less prestige.

Despite all these thoughts, I’m not angry for trying hard; I actually feel pretty satisfied with my efforts and confident that I’ll make it into and through law school in one piece. The money part I’ll worry about later — as soon as I take a nap.

Lauren Mendelsohn is a junior psychology major. She can be reached at mendelsohn@umdbk.com.