Last summer an acquaintance asked me whether I was happy with how life has treated me so far. I can’t remember the exact way that he phrased the question, but I remember being intensely bothered with the underlying implication that life is something that happens to us and that we have little control over our current situation.
It’s absolutely not true. “I’m not a dog,” I thought. “I am an active participant in my life.”
I could have majored in economics instead of history. I could have gone to Harvard, community college or dealt crack on the corner. I could be living anywhere right now, rich, poor, grossly fat, built, or impossibly thin. I could be a woman (tranny fierceness!) or a bearded Alaskan truck driver.
But I am 24, in Minneapolis, with a law degree and a corporate job because of the decisions that I made. I’m working on the beard though…
Sure, surprises and luck happen along the way, but conscious decisions inform how I can create opportunities and grab the ones that present themselves.
Well, usually. I don’t know if that was true this week. Everything was scheduled out. I showed up at work, gym, biked, walked the dogs, cooked… I was on autopilot and that is a little scary.
It wasn’t a bad week, but I wish I was a little more present for it and intentional about my actions.
I think that’s where blogging comes in. A life unexamined, right? Writing about the day forces me to think about what’s going on and stop milling around half asleep. That’s how people stagnate and start waiting on chance to improve their lives.
I rather create my opportunities than waiting for luck announce itself, and that starts again this week.
This is an unpleasant time of the school year. There is a lot of crabbiness, busyness and barely-checked desperation from those who do not have summer or post-graduation jobs lined up.
Being a law student is like being a tourist in a country with a collapsing regime – you want to get your ticket and bail before Anderson Cooper arrives for the stoning.
I obviously get to avoid most of the crazy because I spend my days at my cubicle in the burbs. I pop into school in the late evenings and for tax clinic client interviews, but I am not privy to the drama anymore.
Like the tourist, I watch the mess on my computer screen and hear the stories via text and tweets. And I can’t deal with the delusional 0Ls who want to go to the place I just escaped.
And it’s not because the 0Ls take my advice. They don’t. It’s because like most people who are about to do something incredibly stupid, they need to distance themselves from the naysayers. They write me off as cynical and cranky old man, and they come back a year later and tell me that I was right.
I guess that’s just the status of things.
And let’s be clear – law school is a good idea for some people and I do not regret going to law school. I learned a lot and grew up in the past three years.
But law school is not a straight ticket to a high paying career for the vast majority of students. A legal degree does not mean job security, happiness, respect, or guarantee that you will do better than $12 an hour as a contractor in a basement room at an undisclosed location with bats.
You heard me. Bats. Everywhere.
And as with all rants, you have to end it the moment you start warning people of bats. So beware, and goodbye.
I make mostly decaf espresso drinks (to the horror of my peers) but this is because I had a full-blown caffeine addiction in college. I was up to 12-shots of espresso a day just to keep from going into withdrawal. You know things are bad when baristas gasp at your order…
Caffeine intake was a running joke, a stamina-test of sorts. My withdrawal symptoms got so bad after finals that I got migraines and sinus infections. I needed a change.
At first I stopped drinking caffeine during finals and I eventually gave up caffeine entirely except for the random drive-thru diet coke.
I encourage my 1L and undergrad readers to sever the caffeine ties too. Regular caffeine use doesn’t help you stay alert (see this article) and doesn’t make more you productive (see here). So why bother?
The take home is that regular use of caffeine produces no benefit to alertness, energy, or function.
Regular caffeine users are simply staving off caffeine withdrawal with every dose – using caffeine just to return them to their baseline.
This makes caffeine a net negative for alertness, or neutral at best if use is regular enough to avoid any withdrawal. – Dr. Steven Novella
No thank you mam. I’ll just enjoy my decaf, unsweetened almond-milk-latte. I’m not a hippie at all…
Amber: “I am a happy person. Really. I’m not unhappy, but I am definitely less happy after being in law school.”
I thought it was an odd comment, but I understand it now that I am a 3L.
I remembered Amber’s comment while trying to explain what has happened to me to a college friend. I kept using words such as weary, quieter, subdued, but I could not find a satisfying description of how I am less vibrant than I was in undergrad. I think “less happy but not unhappy” works.
I did a read-through of this blog, which covers most of my college years. The read-through was humbling.
College was fun1 and I was definitely more vibrant in undergrad. What is different about law school, especially 3L year, is that I no longer have an unchecked sense of excitement and optimism.
In college I was not worried about the job market and I did not have to fiercely compete for good grades. I also did not realize the true costs of prestigious things like good law school grades and high-paying jobs, or what many people sacrifice (work, health, relationships) to achieve those things.
The top-prize has some horrible caveat that suddenly makes it undesirable. It’s like competing for a promotion, just to realize that the super-prestigious high-paying “promotion” entails a four-year assignment next to a North Korea sewage dump.
Now, just like the promotion candidates can opt not to take the position in North Korea, I made a choice not to sacrifice certain things for the sake of prestige. So I am happy, but there is still an element of disappointment and loss based on my unrealistic assumptions that makes me less happy… but probably more realistic and grounded.
Giving advice to future law students is EXACTLY like this:
Best Quote:
“Yeah, law students are an awesome bunch. It’s like a distilled bunch of the biggest assholes you knew in college. Are you aware that you’ll spend three years in an environment that in no way, shape, or form even remotely prepare you for something resembling a law career? Plus you’ll likely develop a coke habit.”
Buhaha! It’s funny because it’s true.
And this happens every fall – law school applicants find this blog, email me for advice, and I try to dissuade them as much as possible without sounding like a maniac.
Then, these applicants IGNORE my advice, go to law school, and come back around the next fall with: “OH MY GOD YOU WERE RIGHT THIS IS THE LOONEY BIN! Crushing debt! Despair!”
But I’m frustrated. I did tell you so. You did know better.
I was recently interviewed by a mortgage foreclosure attorney about law school (for this post here!) and during the interview she told me a story about a condominium downtown. The buyers bought pre-construction units. The condo project went bankrupt before the units were completed, and these buyers have to pay mortgages for condos that will never be completed.
For many people, going to law school is like paying a mortgage for a non-existent condo. You have this huge debt, and not much to show for it.
And many law schools are just like these skeezy financially-shaky developers: they oversell the product to the brink of outright lying, and understate the risk.
And like that non-existent condo, your law degree is not going to provide shelter and security.
Now, this isn’t the end of the world because most of us are smart people who can work through financial handicaps. We will take entry-level jobs, live cheaply, and make small monthly payments for a very long time.
But just because the crap-mortgage won’t cripple you is not a reason to take a mortgage on a pre-construction unit, especially after reading about a slew of bankrupt developments.
And just because a law school makes (fraudulent) statements of prestige and employment opportunities is not a reason to sign up for the equivalent of a mortgage. You know better.
Sure, you might end up with a swank unit that you bought for a pre-construction price, just like you might end up with a sweet Biglaw job, but the more likely result is that all you are signing up for a shit-ton of debt for a useless degree or a low-priority lien on a half-finished construction site.
And of course me, in your ear, whispering “I told you so.”
I have leftover pizza, an exceptional Absolut cocktail, and episode 2 of the A-List: New York waiting for me, but I am taking a happy hour pause to speak to the 1Ls because I love you like Joan Rivers loves botox. Y’all still around?
A few friendly reminders:
Breathe.
Start organizing your notes this weekend (outlining) so you don’t have a “oh shit” moment at Thanksgiving when you realize that finals are around the corner. Use the syllabus as a skeletal outline and see if you need to review anything from the beginning of the semester. This is also a good time to hit up classmates for missing notes.
Stop procrastinating your legal writing work. That will bite you in the ass. I promise.
You didn’t become superhuman upon surviving two months of law school. You still need to sleep and eat, and on a related note…
Remember to embrace the burnout.
For example, today I ran around for about 12 hours: studying, fumbling around the tax clinic, dealing with the meltdown of my craptastic school laptop, and attending class (without a laptop ah!)
I have an essay, a research paper, and a presentation to finish. But I am not doing any more work today. I am going to partake in this pizza, my cocktail, and watch my trashy reality show before I go to bed. Why? Because I am burnt out and anything I do tonight will just have to be redone in the morning. It is far more efficient for me to relax, sleep 8 hours, get up early, and then do great work.
How many unproductive hours are you wasting in the library after you’ve burnt out? If you catch yourself reading at a snail’s pace because you spent all day studying then stop. You are burned out and need to rest. Grab a beverage and watch the A-List with me. No one is going to beat you if you finish your homework tomorrow morning.
I am sprawled on the bathroom floor. Blood is everywhere.
The “no mess” mouse trap that I bought is in fact, very messy. Sure, I cannot see the dead mouse in the trap’s chamber, but the trap is swimming in a pool of blood.
The trap is strategically placed under my bath tub, so I have to crawl on the floor to wipe up the pool of stinky mouse blood. Ick.
Cleaning was the theme of the week. My apartment got the complete pre-semester scrub. I changed the vase water, washed sheets and clothes, and shampooed the carpets.
I also scrubbed my kitchen, replaced tiles, and finally hauled in the tumblers that collected in my trunk during the semester:
Summer also ended on Friday with the start of orientation leader training. Being an orientation leader is a lot of work, but I had a great orientation leader who got my 1L year off to a great start, and I hope I can be as helpful to a fresh batch of students.
I am also thrilled that the law school decided to make my “classroom etiquette session” a formal part of orientation. Last year a few orientation leaders gave an informal etiquette pep talk to the section we were in charge of, and I think the administration noticed that our section had fewer social issues than the others.
The theory behind the etiquette session is that very few people are intentionally gunners/anti-social douchecanoes, and you can prevent much of the unnecessary 1L social awkwardness by just making the social rules that are common-sense to most of us clear to everyone.
A few examples are:
Interrupting other students or the professor during class.
Bragging in its various forms.
Monopolizing class time with obscure hypothetical questions.
Bringing inappropriate, obnoxious, or stinky food to class.
How to respectfully disagree during class discussion.
And much more! We’ll see if the advice takes.
The best part about orientation leader training so far is the mini-golf:
Six or seven different offices in the school set up mini-golf courses for us. We had to answer questions about the office to win points, and the points correlated to the amount of strokes we got. The mini-golf challenge was a great way to learn about the different offices, and made me realize how many offices exist in the school that students have no reason to go to.
We have one more day of training and orientation kicks off 8am on Tuesday, and it will pretty much suck up my entire week (8am-4pm)
…and I’m working 30 hours at the office, some time…this will be interesting.
If you are going to UMN law school in the fall, just email me if you have questions. Plenty of your future classmates are already in contact. I’ll either answer your questions or put you into contact with someone who can.
But dear 0Ls, one rule:do not make an ass of yourself before you start school.
I know you are bored and therefore stressing unnecessarily. I know you feel the urge to harrass anyone you can find at your school with petty requests and unreasonable demands. I understand. I sympathize. But stop. You’re being ignorant.
And let’s be clear: UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES is it ever okay to get bitchy with the staff of your future law school. Ever.
You cannot puff out your chest and demand things in law school. This is not undergrad. Complaining is not the way to make friends and influence people at your new school. You’re just going to get flagged as a problem student and experience chafing.
The other day, Jill came across a 0L in the school bookstore who threw a tantrum because she could not get her books early. Orientation is a month away! Calm down. Read a book. Take a yoga class. Find Jesus. Do what you need to do, just don’t burn bridges before you’re an official student.
I know you are excited for law school, but you really need to do two things before school starts:
Trust your school. You don’t have your class schedule or reading lists for a reason.
Relax. A month from now you will wish that you spent August relaxing instead of wringing your hands. Orientation will come. The semester will start. Worrying about it won’t make it happen any faster.
Since my last advice post I received a lot of messages from 0Ls trying to choose between schools. Here are three common themes:
1) Prestige.
Unless you are considering a top 5 or top 10 school, focus on what city or region you want to practice law in.
For example, if you want to live in Seattle, then going to Less Prestigious School of Law in downtown Seattle is probably a better idea than going to a “top 40” school in Georgia.
The top 10-40 schools will tout the few alumni who made it in swank, distant cities to oversell their national reputation. Go to the “okay” school in the city you want to practice in, volunteer, build a network of local attorneys and land a job.
2) Employment rates.
Ignore them. The job market sucks unless you go to an elite (top 5) school.
If a school is waiving around a really high employment rate, call up the career office and ask them these questions:
Does your employment percentage represent the entire class or just the students who responded to the survey?
How many students responded to the survey? Did you verify their employment or is it self-reported?
What exactly counts as “employment” in this survey? How many of these students have paid, full-time positions that require a JD?
You’ll find that many schools count any employment towards their numbers. The student with a research position with a professor that ends a month after graduation counts. The student volunteering at a non-profit counts. The barista counts. If you ask how many of a school’s students actually go on to become paid full-time lawyers, you’ll find a lot of trapeze artists.
3) Specific programs.
Law school is a big investment, so you have the right to ask questions before you get into a crushing amount of debt. If you have a passion for a particular area of law, ask the admissions office to put you into contact with a professor that teaches the subject.
If admissions is unhelpful, then you can always look up the professor on the school’s website, and email them yourself. A simple email will do –
“Hello, My name is Jill Smith. I am an accepted student interested in insurance law. Can you tell me more about Whatever Law School’s insurance law program? I am specifically interested in car insurance…”
I know this sounds scary, but you might just find a mentor, and the worst they can do is ignore you, …which is also telling.
Your class-note organization needs will differ whether you take notes on a laptop or hand-write. I hand-write for some classes but I invariably lose my notes to coffee or car trunk gnomes if I do not transcribe the notes quickly.
UMN law forces us to buy school laptops, but possibly the one good thing about my spastic school laptop is that it came with Microsoft OneNote, which is amazing.
OneNote is sort of like MS Word, but it looks like a binder. It has tabs, and auto-saves whatever you type. You can“print” PDFs and powerpoints into OneNote, so your folder for a class will contain everything you need come finals time. OneNote even lets you highlight the PDFs, and share your folders online if you’re feeling generous.
As far as binders and such… I would hold off buying anything other than maybe pens, one legal pad, and a bag (and please no rolly bags!) until you get the syllabi for your classes. Most of the stuff the bookstore scares you into buying (before you know what you actually need) will just collect dust under your futon.
Study Aids, Dictionaries:
And please don’t buy and supplements or study aids yet. My friends and I wasted so much money on crap we didn’t need.
Westlaw and Lexis are the two online legal research systems that your school will probably give you passwords to during orientation. Lexis has course outlines, and Westlaw has black’s law dictionary, treatises, summaries of law, and topical digests. All of it is online for free. And even if you buy the print version you’ll probably find yourself using the online version anyway because of the convenience.
And, if you cannot resist wasting money, then just get a very small pocket law dictionary. But again, everything is online, for free. If find that you desperately need a print-form-something-or-other during the semester then your school bookstore will still have it.
Time Management:
Scheduling was a little crazy for me during my 1L year because my school had Lexis training, Westlaw training, special 1L seminars, club meetings, etc. and was not very good about communicating exactly when things were.
I recommend Windows Calendar if you have a PC. Windows Calendar is a free program that comes with Vista, and it is similar to Apple’s free calendar program and Google Calendar. What I like about Windows Calendar is that it lets me set alarms, so my computer will flash, buzz, and do the chacha to remind me of an appointment.
If you have a SmartPhone, you can also use that to remind you things.
Also keep a print version of your class schedule. All of us forgot were our classes were during the first few weeks, and because no one knows where they are going, it isn’t uncommon to have a pack of 1Ls waiting in the wrong room because they saw “someone” go into it. Don’t be that person.
One more time management tip! Make “no” your default answer to things that you aren’t super-passionate about. An easy way to decline these invitations (to club meetings, bar night, canasta, etc.) is to say, “I have to decline because I think I have something scheduled for that time/day, but if anything changes I’ll let you know.”
Then, once you get in front of your calendar and reading assignment list, you can figure out if you really DO want to attend whatever you just declined.
And, although I am not sure if this fits really into the organization category, or just a time management/health thing, but, my friends and I noticed ourselves eating out a lot during 1L year.
It is far easier to suck it up and go to the grocery store once a week and take an hour on Sunday to cook basics – plain meat, rice, pasta, etc. and to throw in tupperware for the week.
Then everyday you can just pull out your tubs of pre-prepared basics, do different combinations, dress them up with whatever fresh sides (fruit, etc.) or seasonings, and then have a quick meal original meal.
It sounds like a lot of work , but this is much quicker and cheaper than waiting in line at Chipotle.
