Recently in Law School Category

What comes to your mind when you hear the word "success"? "Success" is a concept that has given me some cognitive dissonance over the years, because I didn't really think much of "success" as such until I went to law school and the word was everywhere. And I resented that to some degree, because the message that we students got (and to varying degrees perpetuated) was this: "Success" means some combination of the following and the more the better: achieving a certain GPA or class rank; getting a clerkship; getting a highly-paid associate position in a large firm; and eventually becoming a partner in that firm, obtaining a high-profile government or corporate position, or becoming a judge or law professor. Although some allowance was generally made for the fact that not everyone shared those goals, acknowledgments that those paths aren't for everyone usually seemed to me to carry with them a hint of disdain.

It's relatively easy to think of success in terms of what one might call "public" career achievements (i.e. visible accomplishments in a particular field). But those kinds of events are not sufficient, nor in every case necessary, to what I would call success "in the broad sense" — a life well lived. It is one thing to be successful at something and quite another to be and feel successful in more general terms. One can be very successful in the deployment of one set of skills and yet relatively unsuccessful in the broader sense and unhappy in life.

Maybe the reason that notion of success is not given much airtime by career services offices in law schools and elsewhere is that it is simply outside the scope of their advising capabilities. They can provide some guidance on how one might think about career decisions in the broader context of one's life, but their expertise relates to job placement much more than to career counseling. So they talk about what they can help with and refer everyone with bigger-picture questions and concerns to books. Just a hypothesis.

I was reading back a few entries in Kevin Heller's blog when I noticed something I must have skimmed over in the first read. In this entry, Kevin remarks, "Man, I miss law school."

When I was in law school, I joked that lawyers who said things like that scared me. Well, half-joked.

Okay, now that there's a little distance (both temporal and spatial) between me and law school, I'm happy to say that there are some things about law school I miss, and there are definitely some people from law school who I miss. But I sure can't say that I miss it on the whole.

Now I just need to pay all those student loans....

JCA describes her feelings and observations of 1L burnout.

By about this time my 1L year, I had become a zombie. I slept an average of five and a half hours a night, eight on weekends. I consumed astonishing quantities of Dr. Pepper and Coca-Cola. The caffeine intake may have kept me awake, but I was so jittery that I struggled to put coherent sentences together. When I tried to speak in class, the words that formed in my brain never seemed to match with the words that escaped my mouth.

Some 1Ls find that they can't easily separate what they're learning in school from the rest of their lives. I was one of them. One chilly October afternoon my 1L year, I caught the bus home from near the law school. My apartment waited for me only nine blocks away, but I was not ready to walk those nine blocks with the weight of all of my casebooks trying to escape from my too-small, too-old backpack. As we rolled down the street, my mind processed every scenario I saw in terms of the Torts class I'd just left. My knuckles turned white as I gripped the pole when the bus stopped short to avoid hitting the pickup truck that had nearly hit a jaywalking pedestrian. In a caffeine-polluted haze of firing synapses, my mind worked to parse out the different questions of negligence, and I felt vaguely ill as I realized that I couldn't stop it.

The school scheduled each ten-student legal writing section for a lunch with the Dean of the Law School. I vaguely remember mine. In one well-practiced snipped of conversation, the Dean said something that I'm sure all of the law students here have heard: that one of the goals of law school was to teach us how to think like lawyers. I thought, "Is that what this is? If so, I don't really want any part of it!"

Even though my law school is considered less psychologically traumatizing than other schools in its class, my first year quite effectively abused my confidence. I can't blame law school alone for that, because there were other things happening in my life that had cut rather deeply into my confidence, too. But law school was not out to help. JCA puts it so well: "There are few things as fragile and battered as an embattled 1L's sense of confidence, and mine seems to have a Kick Me sign tattooed across its shoulderblades." Maybe I'm still feeling shadows of that, though, and maybe that partially motivated my post yesterday.

Lest you get the wrong impression, I should add that I'm proud of what I've accomplished and I'm very excited to practice law. I can say, though, that that first year was the most difficult year of my life. Law school was not the only reason for that, but it compounded other challenges while adding entirely new ones.