Posts Tagged ‘UVa’

The degree to which Law School has consumed my thoughts is extremely punctuated. I decided I wanted to go in Fall ’08 while studying for an Organic Chemistry exam during Thanksgiving Break, and thought of nothing else. I didn’t think about it again seriously until prepping for the June LSAT, then it became my life. I applied and got accepted early decision in November. It felt incredibly near when I attended admitted student’s day in May but now 1L feels extremely far away, though orientation is only a month and a half away.

Part of the problem is that I don’t want to get ahead of myself. Everyone I’ve talked to says that summer prep is useless – with the possible exception of a quick read of Getting To Maybe and a healthy dose of relaxation. In that vein, I’ve been spending my time on a friend’s boat (seriously, everything is better on a boat), watching movies, and catching up with old friends. There will plenty of time for law school (and documenting the process) in the fall!

The only substantive thing I plan to do now is research places to apply for a 1L summer position. Since we can’t contact career services or apply before November first (per NALP guidelines if memory serves) it makes sense to do leg work before I’m swimming in exams.

In other news, I’ll be watching fall OCI (via abovethelaw.com and current students) carefully to determine how panicked I should be about the prospects of actually procuring legal employment after school. But even if it’s bad I refuse to ‘go gunner’ – instead I’ll just fallback on my old plan of renting out jet skis in the bahamas (somebody’s gotta do it!).

When I moved from high school to college, I spent a lot of time and energy thinking about what it meant to be making that transition. It was a rough spot – an entire system of living had to come to a close so that a new one could spring up from nowhere. Of course, about 3 days into orientation all of my lofty thoughts about transitions and growing up were lost in the shuffle of finding classrooms and making friends. I’m positive that once my feet hit the ground in law school I will, once again, be unable to imagine being anywhere else or doing anything else, yet I’m finding myself thinking a lot about what in life will change – and what will stay the same.

I’m definitely nervous about grades. I can vow every morning and every night not to become a gunner, but the facts of the situation make it hard to approach law school in a laidback fashion. The legal job market is contracting (for visceral proof, see the daily posts at abovethelaw.com ) at a painful rate, and even during the best of times it is a fact of legal life that in many (most?) cases, first semester/year grades -> get you 1L/2L summer work -> get you a job. Which means that there’s not a hell of a lot of time to make mistakes or try things out – we’ll all be shooting from the hip with huge stakes.

I’ve heard without deviation that pre-1L prep is useless – from current law students and any book I’ve picked up on the subject – so for now I guess it’s just a matter of waiting and hoping things ‘click’ when push comes to shove. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t thrive in high stress environments, so a (big?) part of me is kind of excited for it all to begin… but with that said, you know those infamous ‘taking a final for a class I never studied for while naked and falling from an airplane nightmares people have? Last night I dreamt that I was trying to buy books for my first day of classes at UVA only to find the bookstore sold out, rendering me incapable of preparing the massive, important assignment we had due on day one.

This from the guy who hasn’t had a class in 4 months and won’t be starting for another 3.

Some things never change!

Introductions are definitely in order! I’ve decided to make at least a passing attempt at anonymity – my username came after about 18 hours without sleep, so forgive me if it doesn’t read as brilliantly as it seemed when I was forcing myself to come up with something before passing out. It’s a vague Shakespearean reference, because I’m a dork and that’s the way I roll, but it’s nothing profound or insightful.

I’m headed to UVA Law in the fall, and I’m impossibly excited. Law school was always in the back of my mind, but I swore I’d research almost anything else before making my decision, as both of my parents are lawyers and I didn’t want follow suit blindly. I actually made the decision to apply to law school halfway through my junior year of college – not coincidentally while studying for an organic chemistry exam and cursing premed students. Once I made that decision, I dropped the bio major and graduated a semester early with an extremely marketable B.A. in Theatre Arts. Best life decision ever!

I’m not sure if I’ll write anything about the application process… $10 says the lion’s share of the readership here will be pre-law students, so it might be useful – but to be perfectly honest I found almost nothing interesting or pleasant about applying to law school, and am not in any hurry to revisit the process. The one piece of advice I have would be to get started EARLY for your season and then keep your head down. There’s a lot to keep in the air and you give yourself a huge leg up to apply early. I’ve done the math – people with my LSAT/GPA were getting accepted at UVA Law until around December, at which point almost all of them started getting waitlisted or rejected (see http://www.lawschoolnumbers.com/ for a fantastic law school applicant data mine).

In the coming months I’ll write more about my hopes for UVA Law, the exploding (imploding?) legal job market, my deep-seated loathing of premeds, moving to Charlottesville, life, the universe, and everything in-between!