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?

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