I meant to post this a couple weeks ago - it's a cool piece by Dahlia Lithwick, slate.com's kick-ass Senior Editor and Supreme Court analyst. I just started law school so I don't have the benefit of hindsight, but a good deal of it makes sense to me.
PS - An archive of Lithwick columns can be found here.
Friday, September 14, 2007
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I came very close to not reading this because I thought "great, another advice column telling you how to maximize your grades and job prospects in law school" - I was glad I read it because it's dead on. You'll probably notice pretty quickly that sane, rationale people that are pleasant to be around generally don't love law school. That's because it's ridiculous. The best move I've made since starting law school was reading for pleasure during my long train commute to school. Try and stay human. The law is typically a bunch of bull anyway - but that took me a full year to realize.
That's all good advice. I don't think the world of corporate law is as bad as some people make it out to be; a lot of people enjoy big-firm jobs, even if their origial reason for taking them was just to make money and get out when they've paid off their loans and saved up enough for a down payment on their home. Simiarly, a lot of people hate their public interest jobs, passing up tens of thousands of dollars in order to do work they believed would make them happy.
Her best advice for law school is to maintain your hobbies, your out-of-school friends, etc. It is relatively easy to do in a city where you already have a lot of friends, but if, like me, you move to a new city when you start law school, it can be hard to do. Also, my 1L schedule kept me in the law building from 9am-8pm, which made it harder to feel as if I really had a life outside of law school.
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