So here’s my deal. I graduated in May of 2007, moved home, and began working for a temp agency. I had left college with little to no idea of what I wanted to do. Being an English major, I had spent four years analyzing and critiquing books and writing enormous papers about them, and so I wasn’t really up for the idea of being an English graduate student. People would always be asking me, “So are you going to teach?” I don’t like to teach. It’s not my thing.
Instead, my parents had this idea of getting me to apply for law school. I had taken the LSAT in December of 07 and was disappointed by the results. So upon coming home, my parents sat me down and explained some things to me. I could live in their house, rent free, with the entire upstairs to myself, as long as I did two things. Kept a consistent job and improved the LSAT score.
I spent the summer in a course for the acceptance exam, and managed to raise my score by quite a few points by September. Bolstered by that kind of “holy shit maybe I can actually do this” realization, I applied to a handful of private and public schools. I got some decent scholarships, even managing to get into a school where my cousin had graduated from and gone on to get the highest Bar exam score of anyone in her state. Or something like that. As much as I love my cousin, I was not about to enter a world where my grandmother, who already makes incessant comparisons between her relatives as some kind of bizarre expression of interest in our lives, would have further reason to compare us. For the rest of our lives.
So I am about to send off my deposit to a state school, where I am glad to have been accepted. It’s a good program, with a brand new library and courtroom where the Supreme Court of my state frequently convenes. There are study abroad opportunities, the school is nationally ranked so there could be better opportunities for summer jobs and beyond, and I am a state resident so the cost is not phenomenally high.
All of these things, of course, mean that I am scared fuckless about going there. Normally anyone gets cold feet about starting a new program, so I kind of expect it, and I’m working on rolling with the questions that I sometimes lose sleep over. Was my score good enough? Does the LSAT really predict how well you do in law school? I am at the lower end of their average scale–does that mean I’m doomed to hate it when I get there? Was undergraduate enough preparation for something this big and terrifying? What if I don’t like it when I get there? What if I fail? Will my parents let me move back in with them to pick up the pieces again?
There aren’t too many questions I haven’t asked myself about law school, but for right now the main thing is that I’m getting there. Figuring things out as I go. It’s not an impossible thing to do if there are too many lawyers in the world like everyone says there are. I think the hardest part is probably distinguishing yourself as a good attorney while maintaining a sense of dignity and reason for being there in the first place.
So there’s a general introduction.
