There are a ton of things that are miserable about being in college. ( Not that there are a lot of good things.) One of the worst things is being told how wonderful and easy it is. (On a side note this is not something you ever hear about law school, people who have finished law school tell you one of two things, law practice is so much better and that they know how you are suffering or get out now it is not worth the miserable suffering.) Being told how easy and fun college is compared to the real world doesn't help anything, It doesn't make a paper write itself or the drama of living with 50 women go away. People who are out of school for a long time forget the misery that comes from being under constant scrutiny, of being judged and maligned at every corner. While there is some of this in the working world the biggest difference is in your job you have time to master your skill, to take charge over your domain. In school everything is new all the time. I think part of the reason you don't hear form lawyers how much better law school is, is that unlike undergraduate education where you put the miserable stuff behind you once you enter the real world (only to take on new and different miseries) the skills you take from law school are much more applicable. Lawyers are given a daily reminder of the ways real practice is better.
I was not happy my last semester in college. The sorority drama seemed especially petty, I wanted to start law school (and despite a lifetime of being told I was exceptional I knew I wasn't going to Yale) my classes seemed especially esoteric and bogged down in the pedagogy of Ivory Tower academia. My degree, in addition to being in political science, is in Rhetoric and the focus of my degree was narrative as public discourse. It couldn't have gotten much more heady or philosophical. There was a time I lived and breathed the words of dead Russians and longer dead Romans and Greeks. But by my last semester I had very little patience for it. The theory that had once excited me felt too far removed from reality. I just started reading the Idiot by Dostoevsky as my commute book, and I am enjoying it so much. I remember now why I once declared my love for depressing Russian literature. It was nice to discover that the frustrations of undergraduate life didn't squeeze the joy of literature from me.
It is easy to look back from the vantage point of twenty years and exclaim how easy everything was and how you wished you had appreciated it more, but that comment is made from the sure footed position of the future. Yes knowing that you passed, graduated and got a job makes it seem easy, but when you're in school none of that is certain. I am sure there are things I will appreciate more about law school from the vantage point of a job that pays me, and hopefully financial security. I try to recognize that it is a shared experience I have with lawyers across the US and that it shapes our profession and will shape me. It is just hard to remember when you are paying someone to break you down and build you back from the broken pieces.
It is easy to look back from the vantage point of twenty years and exclaim how easy everything was and how you wished you had appreciated it more, but that comment is made from the sure footed position of the future. Yes knowing that you passed, graduated and got a job makes it seem easy, but when you're in school none of that is certain. I am sure there are things I will appreciate more about law school from the vantage point of a job that pays me, and hopefully financial security. I try to recognize that it is a shared experience I have with lawyers across the US and that it shapes our profession and will shape me. It is just hard to remember when you are paying someone to break you down and build you back from the broken pieces.
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