A Day in the Life of a Law Student

Orientation

2009-09-09T23:23:00.000-07:00

Orientation is, without a doubt, the absolute biggest waste of time that a school could possibly think of. It was five days of useless information and forced socialization that did nothing but making people more worried about the beginning of Law School. The amount of pertinent information covered could have been covered in about 4 hours, not five days. And to make matters worse all of the valuable information was told to use again on the first day of class, nearly verbatim. The only thing more useless than the orientation program is the mentoring program. To be quite frank, I don't know what in the hell a person who has one year more experience than me is really going to help me out. Everybody studies differently, and everybody has their own way of doing things and all the mentor program does is try and force their method of doing things on you. I don't care how hard the school is, requirements like turning in your notes to your mentor or do other assignments is extremely unwanted, and not at all needed. Its not like it does any good, and do we need any more things to do in Law School? Do we really need an extra hour of meeting per week on top of the class load? No we do not, and the mentoring program at our school is absolutely idiotic and a huge pain in the ass.

Its July and I have homework.

2009-07-27T13:17:00.000-07:00

So its July, and I just got a large packet in the mail with some stuff to read that I am supposed to write briefs for. That's no big deal, I am used to heavy amounts of work since I went to graduate school before I decided to go to Law School. However, what I do find annoying is the required reading of the succeeding in Law School material. Firstly, there are actual assignments in there due at orientation. I know that its probably meant for the best, but I am 29 years old, I have a Masters degree, I know how to allocate my time, and I don't need 250 pages telling me Hey, Guess What Law School is hard. What I find interesting is the a lot of reads as a manual telling the student that we have crappy teachers but that shouldn't effect your learning or your exam scores. Which is true, because dedicated students do well regardless of the professors quality, but they seem to be leaving out the fact of how much harder it is to well if the teacher is crap. There are also several parts in the manual that I find quite pretentious and none of their business, such as there admonishment that we should be doing something physical for 45 minutes everyday, and that we should be able to find time for that. Right, like in the manual they are already telling us that we will be working 10 hours a day minimum for law school, now they want us to cram an hour's worth of physical activity into each day as well. Also we are supposed to allow time for meditation each day as well, and the packet even contains a meditation primer, which frankly is just ridiculous. Some people meditate I guess, others meditate with a beer and sportscenter. Just a bit to pretentious for my tastes. This is Law School, not a M.A. in Holistic Therapy.

Financial Aid

2009-07-02T14:34:00.000-07:00

I will take a second to vent how much I hate financial aid offices. I think that is the job that nobody wants so bad employees get sent there as punishment. Its hard to get anything done, and it seems that the people there feel that the have the upmost power over you and that somehow it makes them better than you because you depend on their processing your financial aid. The worst one I ever dealt with was some D-bag MBA student in my undergrad school. He approached every dealing I had with him as if he was a corporate CEO forcing a take over on my small company. I have been to a few schools, and its been like this at everyone of them, maybe the job just makes people bitter and mean.

Admission and the Summer Before

2009-06-13T13:49:00.000-07:00

Getting into Law School is not an easy process. However the application process itself is much less painless than say, applying to a Phd program. The LSDAS is pretty idiot proof. You just send them everything, recommendations, essays, LSAT score, and transcripts. They take care of compiling everything. Once you get it all gathered up and sent in, applying to multiple law schools is as easy as pie. Since they handle sending all of the stuff to the Law school all you have to do is make sure you have the individual personalized essays sent to the right colleges. Graduate school is a different animal alltogether. For every school that you apply to you have to individually send that school everything. Basically all the same stuff as Law school, including the essays, plus a writing sample. And that writing sample has to be WAY better than anything you submit for law school. Basically applying to Law school is the easy part, getting in is the hard part. Plus if you are applying to different Law schools you don't have very much time to decide which of the schools you got in to accept. Since Law schools require deposits, you pretty much have to choose early on, unless you rolling in dough and can pay the deposits for each Law school and eat the loss when you lose it. It would be best to have in mind the order or preference as to which Law school you would prefer to go to before the letters start coming in. This is useful unless of course you get waitlisted and then taken off the wait list, that just puts a nice wrence in the works when that happens. Of course the summer before is just the usual, finding an apartment, getting set ready to start the grind, and lots of apprehension about what you have gotten yourself into. Lots, and lots of apprehension and stress. Right now I am not getting to much sleep at night, guess I should get used to that.