Archive for June, 2009

Undergrad is a curious place. I was 18 when I first set foot on Wellesley’s gorgeous green campus. When I think about how easily I could have ended up at some other college and how drastically different my life would be as a result, it really freaks me out. As with most good things that happened for me in my life, I really owe it all to my mom. For when the unsolicited application came in the mail, I recoiled at the thought of attending an all-women’s institution. Mom rather forcefully insisted that I apply, and so to avoid incurring her wrath, I scraped together an application and threw it in the mail on the day of the deadline.

I flew into Boston to visit Wellesley at their admitted students event in spring 2002, and the moment I stepped on campus, I was in love. Everywhere you looked people were smiling and getting along, offering to direct you somewhere if you looked lost (which I did – and do – a lot). I feel really lucky to have gone there.

But as I look back on my college experience, I have a lot of – well, regrets seems like too harsh a word. It’s more like…if I could do it over, I’d do a lot of things differently. Wellesley was almost wasted on me. I was too young to appreciate it. If I could do it over, I would take advantage more of what they had to offer in terms lectures and guest speakers and organizations and other academic opportunities. I wish I had designed a course schedule more in line with my intellectual curiosities as opposed to what would let me sleep in the most days. I wish I had – as my mother urged – majored in economics.

I don’t want to leave law school in three years with the same kinds of regrets. I fear that I’ll be so concerned with just surviving Columbia Law that I’ll never get a chance to really thrive and enjoy my experience. The stakes are so much higher now. I fear that I’ll fall back into that familiar complacency that prevented me from getting all I really could out of my undergraduate years.

Then again, there’s a certain amount of ‘getting my money’s worth’ mentality at play here. I’ll be shouldering the cost of law school myself and I’ll be damned if I waste a single penny of the aforementioned debt. Perhaps that thought alone will be enough to keep me from letting awesome opportunities slip by.

In other news, I have just about three more weeks left of work before my summer of uselessness commences. (By useless, I mean absolutely no so-called “law school prep.” No E&Es, no Gilberts, none of that crap. By and large, current law students seem to believe that spending any time on that before you get to law school is a waste of time and I’ll take their word for it. Especially if it means more time to spend watching bad reality TV.) I’m going to spend a lot of time in Jersey with the family, catch up with old friends, roam about the city, and hopefully hit the beach and maybe Six Flags. Next week some current CLS students are organizing a happy hour for New York-area rising 1Ls and I’m pretty excited about that. It’ll be awesome to meet my future classmates in a stress-free setting.

So let me ask you, rising 1Ls who happen to be reading, what are your plans for the summer before law school?

Time to sit back and unwind . . . yeah right. In a last effort to round out my resume (minus grades and such after having entered law school) I decided to take on an unpaid internship this summer. Considering the only other young person volunteering in my new office is a 2L, I’d say I did pretty well and I’m hoping that, by next summer, the non-profits, clinics, or professors (keeping fingers crossed . . . firms?) I apply to work/volunteer for look favorably upon my time spent here. I will finally get some substantive exposure to working in the legal field here, which is radically different from my other law-related internships where I was largely confined to the copy room or front desk answering phones all day. While this new-found responsibility is somewhat refreshing, it’s also a little scary. I may now be held accountable for whether or not certain significant information and case preparation is handled properly — all this while still not having been to even a little bit of law school. Additionally, since this new position is not paid, I am for the moment forced to keep my other job as well. So my life has all of a sudden become less than spectacular — perfect prep for the law school work load, right?

Which brings me to my next point. I tried doing a little preparation for law school by reading through some E&Es (that’s, “Example and Explanations” for those not in-the-know) and found them to be both boring and interesting. I got about halfway through one book and then lost my interest/work ethic and instead spent my time reading ”One L,” a sort of reflection/autobiography by Scott Turow on his first year as a law student at Harvard. Wow. I don’t think anything has scared me so much about next year, never mind the countless online and in-person testimonials about just how hard life as a 1L is.  At times, it also made me feel quite inferior for not getting into Harvard (yet?), but more on that later. Anyway, it’s well written and so if you 0Ls are looking for a good scare to keep you up at night, check it out.

And now for some last minute thoughts on my admissions cycle, and perhaps some more tidbits of wisdom, as I now feel it has come to a de facto close. I’m still sitting on three waitlists but am fairly confident, given the time of the year and extremely competitive cycle this year, that I will not get accepted off any of them. As for advice: 1) Apply early – though many law school claim not to have “rolling” admissions, I believe they do review applications in the order they are received. The earlier you are placed in the “yes” pile, or the “maybe” pile, the better shot you have at acceptance as more spots exist in the class early on. 2) Do your research – find a clinic, specialty, center, professor, etc. specific to each school and write about how that feature interests you in particular about that institution. And 3) Proofread, proofread, proofread – I heard the horror stories about applicants applying to Stanford and writing in their personal statements ” . . . and that is why Harvard would be a perfect fit for me,” and yet I still managed to incorporate some typos, though minor, in my applications. Yes, they are tedious and, yes, it sucks to fill in the same type of information over and over in a slightly different format (especially if you’re like me and apply to over 15 schools), but proofreading is a necessary evil.

Ok. Until next time, stay thirsty my friends.

As I write this post I have by my side a glass filled with cheap wine. And not a wine glass either. A regular glass. A glass into which you might pour milk to go along with your dinner. Had I a stronger stomach (or liver), this glass might be filled with vodka or (more likely) rum. But a bottle of the corner liquor store’s finest 2008 Riesling will have to do. This writing aid is necessary as I tackle this particular topic. This will come as no surprise to anyone but:

OH DEAR GOD LAW SCHOOL IS EXPENSIVE!

It’s painful, but I’m going to disclose all the dirty details in the hopes that it proves useful to any 0L who happens upon this blog. Here is the breakdown (takes sip of wine):

Let’s just let that sink in for a moment, shall we? (takes gulp of wine)

$193,000.

That right there (plus interest) is the debt I can look forward to in May 2012 (several gulps of wine). Such a figure looks positively obscene to me, especially when I think about how I managed to come out of undergrad with debt that looks like a pittance in comparison.

Despite my strategic blunder of paying my tuition deposit before receiving my financial aid award (over-zealous much?), Columbia gave me a $20,000 grant to be distributed throughout my three years as follows: $8,000 for 1L year, $8,000 for 2L year, and $4,000 for 3L year. The rest of my award is comprised of Federal need-based loans. Apparently the US government thinks I have $40,000 lying around in a shoebox somewhere (where’d my wine go?). Alas, I do not. So, for the $40,000 difference, I will have to take out the credit-based Federal GradPLUS loan. I applied for this and have little doubt that I will receive the money I asked for so I’m not worried about a last-minute plea to a private lender. (Advice to 0Ls: You will most likely need to apply for credit-based loans so make sure you check your credit in plenty of time to resolve any issues before the time comes to apply to law school.)

Taking on this kind of debt is not for the faint-of-heart, which is why I advise those who choose law school by way of elimination as opposed to determination to choose something – anything – else. It irritates the crap out of me to meet people who decided on law school for lack of anything better to do. What else, they reason, am I going to do with this BA in English (or Philosophy or History or Sociology)? These are usually the same people who believe that the practice of law is accurately depicted by Sam Waterston.

So yes, law school is frighteningly expensive. But I’m going to do my best to never comment on that fact ever again. I’m planning future posts on the art of living on a pauper’s budget, but other than that, I refuse to stress over the massive quantities of debt. It’s a done deal. That’s Future Soleil’s problem anyway.

For the first time in four years I am spending the summer at home. As an undergraduate student, I stayed on campus each summer, but as of May 18th – that title no longer applies. Whenever I venture home I pretend that I am camping as we live in the boondocks, we don’t have a land line, our house is the one place that was apparently overlooked by AT&T’s “more bars/more places” campaign, and internet access is nowhere to be found. Needless to say, while at home I seek any (and every) escape I can find. I was hoping to land a paid escape for the duration of my stay in order to complete my epic battle against my credit card and put a few sticks of furniture in the new apartment (whenever I get around to finding one). Unfortunately, there isn’t much work in my area where a few floundering factories provide the majority of local jobs.

After a few agonizing days of uninterrupted “camping,” I was excited to receive an 8AM interview at a call center. The call center is about an hour from my house in the boonies, so I woke up at 6AM, got dressed, filled the tank, and made the journey only to be told – not even two minutes into the interview – that I was overqualified for the job. The interviewer politely explained that my college degree means I am destined for more than call center work (although I’m not sure she was entirely in the know; I mean, a BA isn’t what it used to be). I wanted to thank her for wasting my time, gas money and beauty sleep just to tell me that in person, but instead I explained that I will be seeking out my true destiny in August at Cornell to which she replied “that works out great then because we aren’t currently hiring for short-term positions.” Did you read my application AT ALL, woman? I checked the short-term/summer box! Back to the boonies…

If it isn’t one thing around the house, it’s another. First, death found time to visit our decrepit, old lawnmower leaving us with half an acre of overgrown field for a lawn. To make matters worse, there have been multiple bear sightings in the area. Most recently, an adult black bear was spotted in the local Arby’s parking lot (guess he was thinking Arby’s?). When we finally resurrected the lawnmower long enough to cut the grass nearest the house, we discovered a large flattened area where something VERY large had been lying undetected. Great.

I love balmy rainstorms during the summer. Tonight is a particularly stormy evening and I couldn’t wait to curl up under the covers. The rain is pelting the windows steady and hard. Brilliant streaks of blue, white and violet lightning flair at odd intervals, and the thunder that follows is intense enough to shake the house. All that’s missing is a howling wind. Anyway, I was headed for bed when I noticed a gurgling noise in the closet. No, it wasn’t the Arby’s bear. The roof was leaking. Apparently it has been for a while. Before I could go to sleep I had to fetch an empty 5-gallon paint bucket to replace the already full one (which was bubbling over and making the gurgling sound). I ventured to the bathroom to dump the bucket, cleaned the pieces of drywall and roof that had found their way into the bucket out of the tub and, well, then I wasn’t quite sleepy anymore. I grabbed a Klondike bar out of the freezer and cozied up on the couch to document these recent misadventures for the blog.

In between bear battling and job hunting, I’ve been trying to work with LEEWS, which has caused me to have serious jitters about becoming an attorney. I mean, people are going to trust me with their problems and expect me to provide satisfactory solutions. What if I suck at it? Of course, I have to survive law school first…

1L FEARS
1) Cornell’s notoriously small class size will = lots of annoying gossip.
2) Law school will be full of inescapable phony people.
3) I will become boring/uninteresting/neurotic.
4) I will have no time for the activities that I love.
5) I will be in the bottom of the class.

1L GOALS
1) Keep up my running.
2) Top 10%
3) Keep my easygoing nature in tact.

1L PREDICTIONS
1) By the end of 1L I will look something like this:

2)…and I will manage to land somewhere in the middle of the class.

Well, the wind just kicked up to complement the symphony raging on outside. I’m going to try to get some sleep.