law school in a nutshell...or a couple of paragraphs.

My old roommate Kelsey gave me this funny book for my birthday called “Ivy Briefs: True Tales of a Neurotic Law Student.” It’s hilarious and gives a hugely accurate depiction of what being a law student is like. Here is one of my favorite passages which reflects my own experience:

“Elite law schools pride themselves on the fact that they instruct students on how to think like lawyers instead of teaching them the actual law that they need to know in order to be lawyers…professors make you figure [out the law] for yourself. They do this by employing the case method, where they force their students to read hundreds of judicial opinions during the course of the semester, somehow decipher what each case is saying, and then try to piece the rules extracted from each case together to understand how they work in unison to form an entire body of law. It’s not dissimilar to trying to work an eight hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle made up of only plain white pieces…

The professors know what [the cases] mean. But do they explain the meaning to the students? No. No, they don’t. Instead, they rely on a medieval torture device called the Socratic method…a process whereby venerated law professors reduce innocent law students to quivering heaps of jelly by questioning them relentlessly in front of a large class filled with their peers…the professor asks. You answer. He says, “but what about this? How do you reconcile your answer with this?” You dig deep within yourself and find a response. He then says, “okay, so how about we twist the facts of the case around, then how would you respond?” This process is then repeated ad nauseam until, at some point, the professor has backed you into a corner and proved that you are nothing but a monumental idiot.”

16.67% Completed.

I made it.

Barely. I survived my first semester as a 1L in the twilight zone known as law school. And now, as I have to start earnestly thinking about buying books and doing my reading (yes, reading—which was assigned around the beginning of December, though we were yet to suffer through finals), I feel like my life is on pause while the rest of the world storms past me in fast forward.

It’s all so surreal; my roommate now works 60 hours a week at her job, my best friend is getting married in July, other friends are bringing new life into the world, and I’m stuck in a black hole of grad school, a place where adults pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to pretend to be college students again. So while Rachel tends to Ben Bernacke and Kara saves lives, I’m sitting in a lecture surfing Facebook or playing Tetris. I don’t work 40 hours a week or bring home a salary or raise children. Nope, I still live my life in semesters. I fill my brain with an unending amount of case law and study for finals and pretend to pay attention in class.

So it’s strange. It’s strange to feel like a kid though you’re about to turn 23 and your friends are off doing grown-up things like working and getting married and having kids of their own. But I made it. I survived the hellish experience known as being a 1L. I didn’t sleep, I read thousands of pages of court cases, I started drinking caffeine again, and I became a big fan of B minuses. I made it.

Uh, only 2.5 more years to go?