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How do you deal with oral exams? Soon I will be having two oral exams. Both will be in English, which is only my second language and has me stuttering a lot more than I already do, so I guess most of you can relate to how nervous I am right now. I would like to learn how others deal with situations like this instead of sitting around feeling sorry for myself. Let me tell you about how I feel every time I face oral exams. First of all, in the weeks before I try not to think about the fact that I will inevitably have to stutter trying to answer a question. I try because picturing the situation is extremely demotivating as it automatically makes me question my choice of becoming a lawyer. It makes me just sit around for hours asking myself why the f**k I constantly and voluntarily make myself take classes that involve oral exams which will leave me feeling stupid and humiliated. Still, I don't always succeed in forcing myself not to think about the inevitable. To be honest, it hardly ever works. I see a word I know will be hard to speak out loud and when I try, I realise that it will be a problem. However, by far the worse impact stuttering has on my academic career is another. During the oral exams I will start stuttering, and by this I mean I will stumble over words I simply cannot say (for me, these are words that start woth the letters PR, as in protect, private, property etc). Sometimes it gets the better of me and I panic. I have low self-esteem, which might be something a lot of stuttering people have to deal with. So if I start stuttering and if I then realise that it won't go away it's like a voice appears in my head that tells me to stop talking. It tells me to stop humiliating myself. And I do. Even though I know the correct answer and I could use the terms legal English provides I will rather say something that won't make me stutter as bad. It has happened that I simply claimed to not know the answer. In these situations I chose a bad grade over feeling like an idiot. So in eight days I will once again be face to face with one of my greatest fears, public humiliation. This may seem like I hate what I'm doing, but that's not the case. I love being in law school and I'm specialising in a field I'm fascinated in. I will not let the fact that I need longer to finish a sentence than others get in my way. I will rock. So please tell me this: how do you handle the harmful urge to shut up? And how do you guys deal with the career-wise demotivational aspect of stuttering while thinking about your future?