ali & ali wrote:Thanks for fielding questions, mallard. How do you find the overall stress of Harvard Law? I'm coming out of UG a little burned out, and I'm really interested in law intellectually and practically. Are you and your classmates constantly stressed out/competitive with one another, or is there an overriding sense that y'all will all do fine because of your relative position at the heart of a broken heirarchical legal machine?
Haha. I guess I'm being a little melodramatic. Anyhow, I find Harvard pretty stressful in general. Everybody has a sense that they'll do well with jobs and that sort of stuff, but especially during finals, everybody's working very, very hard, either because they want the grades or because of their natural propensities.
I took a year off and mostly posted on TLS during that year. (Honestly.) I think it was very good. I came into law school very energized,
wanting to study,
wanting to work hard, and I think that's how I was able to jump into a very solid study schedule a couple weeks in. There's not always a great support structure here and everything moves pretty fast and to a certain extent cumulatively, so you want to make sure you're not so burned out that you might get left behind.
I can't say much about the "intellectual and practical" interest in the law since all I've done so far is 1L required courses. I will say that the issues are rarely unimportant or uninteresting and legal reasoning is a good skill to have.