This Is the Kind of Thing I Do Instead of Work

Jeremy Blachman's Law School Purity Test

So according to Jeremy, I can't officially be considered a law student yet. Mostly because I have yet to make out with a professor in a dorm room the week before the exam to find out what the questions are. At least I have a goal now though (to rack up enough points to be considered a law student, not to make out with a professor. ew.)

Day One Down, Three Years (minus one day) To Go

I know that everyone who is in a position to be able to dispense advice about law school has said to pay no attention to what other people say in class because they have NO IDEA what they're talking about. But why is that they sound exactly like they do?

Also, I do not think it's nice of professors to say things on the first day of class such as, "I would love to tell you that your grades don't matter, but that would be dishonest." He went on to explain that one day, we will look back on it and our grades will seem utterly trivial. Except that nobody will ever hire us if we don't have good grades. In fact, that's pretty much all they look at. I guess it's easy to see how grades will seem trivial when you're standing on a street corner begging for change, degree rendered useless, three years of your life wasted. Thanks for the motivation.

A Lack of Motivation

Getting out of class Friday, and an hour early at that, was awesome. Until I realized that despite the large amount of reading, long and tiring days of class and surprisingly difficult exam (well, it would have been difficult if there was any reason to believe that they were even going to be read, let alone graded), it was only the end of Orientation. Actual classes haven't even started yet!

I love how I told myself at the end of the summer that, now that I'm in law school, I'm going to buckle down and be a stellar student. I'm going to stay on top of my assignments, pay attention in class, get work done well ahead of time and generally stop attempting to survive on my ability to bullshit. And yet, I am fully aware that this is the same exact thing that I tell myself at the beginning of every academic year. But then I inevitably realize one undeniable, unavoidable fact: I'm lazy. And I love to procrastinate.

This year will totally be different though. I'm going to get all my reading done, and I'm going to do it ahead of time. Starting...well, not right now. Maybe later.

Disorientation

Whew, orientation week is almost over and thus far, I've survived. Of course, I still have an "exam" to take tomorrow, but I've been assured that so long as I spell my name correctly and write words on a piece of paper, I am guaranteed to pass. If only it were an accurate preview of the year to come...

Orientation at Law School, to my great dismay, is completely unlike orientation at college. College orientation is like summer camp, only drunker. Most people are out of their parents' supervision for the first time, eager to have new experiences, make new friends and then proceed to get drunk with said friends. Colleges (well, at least mine) provide vaguely fun, or at least fairly mindless, activities complete with standard ice breakers and free food to facilitate this (ok, maybe the administration doesn't actively facilitate the drunken part, but it occurs regardless--and free ice cream, yay!). Apparently, it's all downhill from there.

The main event of Law School orientation, on the other hand, has been a daily three hour, one credit, introductory class. Though opportunities to attend open bar parties with your classmates have been provided, so have 60 page nightly readings. This is not to say that the readings and the class must be taken seriously (or get done, for that matter), but isn't the fact that they exist enough to make it suck just a little?

The professor teaching my section for this course seems brilliant. Not only that, but he can actually decipher even the most moronic, off-topic comments from the class and make them some both intelligent and relevant (perhaps the fact that I thought they were stupid in the first place says something about my intelligence, but hey, shut up). In fact, the faculty at Law School appears to be incredibly intelligent and accomplished. But despite the caliber of the faculty and the school itself, and the fact that they are running an ORIENTATION program, Law School is completely inept at making sure incoming students are ACTUALLY ORIENTED. It took almost a week of orientation just for them to tell us what our email addresses are, they haven't finished putting all the names in the system for people to access wireless internet, we just got our tuition bills a week ago, and they still haven't told us what subsection we're in for legal writing. Hi, it's Thursday. Classes start Monday. Some of us would like to know if we'll be required to attend legal writing at that time. Thanks.

In all honesty, I've been pretty impressed with Law School so far. The people in my section are pretty smart overall (and even the idiots use big words to express concepts that they have questionable understanding of), and they're friendly too. That may be subject to change as classes start and the reality of the curve kicks in. But, at least for now, it seems as though there may only be one or two pompous douchebags, which is always a good thing.