Nice Guys [Law Students] Always...

So I was wandering through my Facebook feed, when a link to a friend and former group-project-teammate was posted up on her website's blog. You may or may not agree with her comments on any given post, but the blog got me to thinking about various topics...

"Nice Guys" in Dating, and Life in General
First off, if one is a nice guy, is it really that easy to change? I would consider myself to be something of a Nice Guy. In general, the people I'm close friends with find me to be understanding, fairly selfless, and willing to listen (evidence to the contrary notwithstanding). Odds are, I will eternally be one of those people who hear "I just don't want to screw up the great friendship we already have." As an interesting aside: Have you ever noticed that whenever An At Least Mildly Attractive Girl Who Is Actually Just A Friend is trying to set up The Nice Guy with the At Least Mildly Attractive Girl Who Is The Love Interest, that the former finds it hard to believe why the latter wouldn't want to date The Nice Guy? For "Just A Friend," The Nice Guy is everything a relationship partner should be (sensitive, caring, understanding, funny, etc.), but if "Just A Friend" and "The Love Interest" switched places, their positions towards The Nice Guy would switch too!

The Romantic Interest of the Nice Guy can automatically change The Girl from "You'd make such a great BF!" to "You'd make such a great BF(F)!" It's like Schrodinger's Cat. By Observing (having an Interest In) the girl...you change her. Wild huh?

My friend says in her post that she struggled to decide exactly what to tell her guy friend who was asking about how to meet folks in that she didn't want to taint his Niceness by turning him into a "cooler" but more a-holish version of himself. I have a suspicion that'd be harder said than done. A common fallacy (I think) among (some) girls is that guys "can be changed" for better or for worse. Despite touting phrases like "you can't change a man" they nevertheless try to bend the rules, just a bit, just this once. It's my opinion that it takes a longggg longggg time to manage to change someone's personality: Any changes one sees in short time are simply cosmetic.

But that's enough of that. Back to Law School.

"Nice Guys" in Law School
Does it pay to be a Nice Guy in Law School? In what is described to be a super competitive landscape, riddled with so-called Gunners, is being nice in the Law School World a liability? Is giving someone the outline that you sweated and labored over the entire semester so as not to be driven to insanity by last minute writing stress stupid? Despite what happy-go-lucky movies may say, altruistic acts don't always pay dividends (though if you're looking for dividends, you're exercising false altruism...). I will say this much that I know from past experience. At my Undergraduate Business School, we heard rumors upon acceptance that the place could be cutthroat, that no one helped anyone. Turns out that was about as wrong as one could imagine: We needed each other. We worked together in groups all the time. If you had, indeed, been an a** you would be hated, shunned, and ultimately thrown under a bus come peer review time (as I did to one particularly awful teammate at the end of my undergrad career).

If there's one thing that I've learned so far, it's that to successfully learn the law, you need other people. Whether it's because you're running a study group or you're being collectively grilled by way of the Socratic Method, the law is a complex animal which one person alone cannot hope to defeat. Unless he/she has multiple personalities. Who all got 170+ on the LSAT. So, perhaps for once it's a good call to be a Nice Guy. Because it's a lot better to share the love (and the outlines) and get some in return than to always go solo and be a Gunner on your own.

Because no one likes a Gunner.