[Law School Journal #2:] Standing on the Edge of Oblivion

Chapter One: Preparation is the Hardest Part

It is the summer of 2009. By some sheer grace of God and sweat, blood, and tears, I’m now looking at a somewhat less troubling GPA. I find myself in a position remarkably similar to last year: I returned to work for my old department, in the same location. My room is not far removed from my original habitation. I am on the internet looking at law schools. My chances, despite my improved GPA, look slim. I begin to stumble across the websites that many aspiring law students find themselves browsing: “Top Law Schools,” “Law School Predictor,” “Law School Numbers.” I refrain from asking too much about my chances: I already know they are poor.

Every year, thousands of hopefuls set their sights on law school. With the economy being the way it is currently, the opportunity cost of getting more education is at a shockingly low level. Nevertheless, the legal market has long  since succumbed to the weight of far too many students coming out of law school for far too few places to work.

It has been a long time since when my mother went to law school. She went to a strong school: what aspiring law students would now call the "T-14." She describes from her experience the school administration could cheerfully promise that everyone who graduated from the school would find a job, and it was simply a matter of determining how cushy a job one would get. Gone, it seems, are those days.

The law school application process is a lot more forward thinking, I think, than in my mother's day. Applicants now are no long simply fixed on the strengths and opportunities of the schools themselves but also on that all important question: Will going to this school get me a job in 3 years? With the costs of law school attendance continuing to rise, pushing the total cost of school shockingly close to $200,000 in 3 short years, plus the weight of interest, going to law school seemed to become a business decision, a risk analysis. Learning for learning's sake was well and good, but only if it paid off with employment. Or at least, that's what I learned on TLS.

A year after having decided to consider law school, I found myself in a better position than before, certainly. I would hesitate to say I was in a "good" position, but I certainly was in a better one. I had worked hard in my classes, harder perhaps than I had ever needed to in undergrad. It has paid off, and I had my best year by far. Now as I sat in a very similar position thinking about my future, I exposed myself for the first time to the world outside of my door. I logged on to TopLawSchools.com.

TLS, as the frequenters of the website call it, is a forum for but aspiring and current law students to meet and socialize about all things having to do with school. At the time of my first log-on, I didn't stay long. I don't know if I even bothered to generate a user name and password. If I had known how much time I would spend poring over the forums, seeking to extract the all-important pearls of wisdom from the waves of alarmism and overly opinionated commentary about nothing of import, how it could so easily consume a man, turning him into an obsessive follower of every thread vaguely referencing something of interest, I might have been appalled. At the moment, though, I was innocent. At the moment, though, I was sane.

A condition, I assure you, which would not last.