As long as I have a soapbox, I might as well use it…

There are a few things that have been weighing heavily on my mind as of late. I finally decided to write a post for a few of reasons: (1) they’ve incubated in my mind long enough to finally be (somewhat) coherent; (2) sheer determination not to do any other constructive school work; and (3), to see (which I posit is likely) if there are others out there who are mulling over any of the same issues/problems.

This past weekend I had a lot of free time to just sit and think, which has proven dangerous in the past, but this time only yielded more questions than I had hoped for. Our workload was light the previous week for the beginning of the 1L Trial Competition and a couple of my section’s classes were cancelled. To top off what would have been a great weekend camping, I came down with a nasty cold, and my weekend in the wild quickly turned into a few days of me sitting at home alone in a bean bag chair (www.sumolounge.com) watching late night TV and eating cheetos (but not naked…sorry Ron).

Sitting as I was, I began to wonder what I really expected to get out of this whole law school “experience.” I contemplated the work that I have done, the work I am currently doing, and the work that is yet to be done, weighing it all against what the theoretical end result is—passing the bar and getting a decent job (I’m much to pessimistic at this point in my life to believe in a dream job anymore). Obviously, such jobs aren’t out there simply waiting. We have to work hard for them and prove ourselves worthy. This is done through our routine class work, preparation, and our performance on the ever-dreaded finals. Success in these categories inevitably leads to success in other areas. A student gets a summer job, then another summer job, and eventually an offer for permanent employment. But what happens to those who go through the routine, who prepare to the best of their abilities, and for some reason still come up short on the finals? It was not for any lack of trying or even a lack of intelligence. There are plenty of my classmates who I know are smarter than I am, yet who did more poorly on their finals. There is just some cosmic glitch were the grades just don’t come. There is a flip side to this coin too. There are the people who do the routine class work, but are rarely prepared or seem to have any clue what is going on, yet by some miracle, perform well on exams. Doors open, champagne falls from the heavens, and these idiot savants march their merry ways in to interview after interview while the people who actually deserve the jobs—the people who will make good attorneys—are left behind. Both sides of this coin concern me greatly.

Granted, this is all from the perspective of a (pessimistic) 1L who is part way through his second semester. I am told time after time that things will change—that there will be some sense of justice yet, but quite frankly, from my point of view, that just doesn’t seem very likely at the moment. Assuming that the grades do level out, the lucky streaks end, and the deserving get what they deserve; there is still the issue of what happens now, in the present, until those things do happen. There are still the undeserving and incompetent who will snatch up the first summer’s worth of jobs with the help of the ever-so-delightful career services office. That place is a joke in and of itself. The office might as well change its name to the Tippy-Top Tree-house and hang rope ladders from the ceiling. The only people that they seem to even be remotely concerned with comprise the upper echelon of the class—the very students who don’t really need any help finding a job. However, these students get the upper hand on subsequent jobs. Even if grades do balance out, there remains the fact that these people have still already had the experience and benefit of a summer job. Who would you rather hire, a student with a 3.4 GPA, or a student with a 3.2 GPA who has also had experience in the exact line of work you will be putting him/her into?

I think the main problem comes in the decimating nature of law school and the need for a glimmer of some semblance of success. Success for the law student is an associateship with X, Y, and Z, LLP, and to see that possibility snatched from our grasp when we were so close makes the experience that much more bitter. It becomes hard to find the redeeming value when you receive little to no positive reinforcement what so ever for three years on end. One easily beings to ask oneself why go through three years of hell without any intermediate reward?

Of course there are all the sappy clichés, such as without the bitter, life wouldn’t be as sweet, but those only carry one so far. Law school for the average student I think is most akin to a hideously painful endurance test. How much pain and suffering are you willing to go through before you come out on the other side? After first semester grades came out, I seriously considered not coming back. I asked myself what was the point of spending so much money—money I could otherwise be using to start my life, buy a home, settle down—to just be average at something? I still haven’t really answered that question all the way, but I think the beginning of the answer is that this isn’t just something. Law school, I am told, is an education in power. To truly understand and appreciate power, one has to be completely deprived of it. One has to learn to both fear, and revere it. Law school does just that. It deprives you, humiliates you, turns your sense of reality upside down, and if you make it through to graduation, you will have mastered something that some will not even begin to comprehend or understand. That is the most basic summary I can come up with at the moment—the most plain rationale. Sure there are exceptions—that’s why this answer is incomplete, but for the moment, at this time in my life, that is my answer.

So here I sit, tired, dejected, humiliated, disheartened, ready to go back for one more day, and ready to take one day at a time.