[Law School Journal #1:] Enter the Law Student

Prologue

The year is 2008. I have just finished my sophomore year. It is the early portion of summer. I am sitting alone in my temporary summer lodgings: a room in a part of the Quad foreign to me. I have just started my first summer working for my University's Conference Services Department, hired as manager. The weather is already blazingly hot, but the personal air conditioning holds the heat at bay. I am at my computer.

I did not always want to be a lawyer. Indeed, most of my life I had fervently opposed the notion. My mother was a lawyer in private practice. She worked long hours, and there would be some periods during my high school years when our respective schedules would be so busy that I might not see her for days. My mother worked hard and earned little for her efforts. I had spent long days with her at her small office before I was old enough to stay home alone, and had learned then that this was not the life for me.

In the summer of 2008, I found myself sitting alone in my room. Just a few weeks earlier, my grades had come trickling out of the long pipeline that was the final review and tallying of all of my accomplishments over the previous semester. The grades had not been good. A look at my transcript would not have suggested that attending a top law school was in my future. At that moment I wasn't even focused on the possibility of law school. At that moment I was fixated on the terrifying reality that if I didn't manage to make a change, my chances at employment were shot. That in itself was saying something. I went to a strong undergraduate business school, and I started my four year stint with the shining figure of $80,000 fixated in my mind. This was the average starting salary of a graduate of my school.

The figure was something of a fallacy to me: I was a marketing major, not the option which brought with it massive rewards in exchange for massive time commitments. My choice of major ensured that I would have the opportunity to keep my creativity, though I might never reach as high highs, financially, as some of my classmates. Add to that the recession, which by now was more than a notion, and the view among business owners that marketing was a luxury which could be cut in lean times. With my transcript, my theretofore lackluster resume (in my opinion), and these conditions, I was coming to realize that I would be happy just to scrape together any internship next summer, never mind a dream firm job.


It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what led to my lackluster showing after my second year. I would not say that it was lack of trying. Perhaps it can be best described as an “incorrect application of my talents.” I had spent my high school years doing well: I took hard classes, but still managed to be successful enough to get slightly over a 4.0 cumulative QPA. “QPA” stands for quality point average, a GPA weighted to account for APs and Honors. Perhaps I had always believed that I could manage to do “just well enough” that I could always manage to scrape by. Perhaps I had forgotten that my goal should always be to shoot for an A, and accept a B only as the exception rather than the rule.

Perhaps, I thought, I wouldn’t be staring at these C grades.

The air outside was hot. My face was grim. My future looked bleak. Unfortunate circumstances, but an auspicious evening nonetheless:

This was the evening I decided to go to law school.