Do you love/like law school? pls post reasons Forum

[t-14orbust]

undergrad was a lot more "fun" in the traditional drug abusing/music festival attending/beerpong tournament dominating sense.

there are other ways to have fun?

[jbagelboy]

undergrad was a lot more "fun" in the traditional drug abusing/music festival attending/beerpong tournament dominating sense.

there are other ways to have fun?

Yea, I think there are. And the city scene definitely has its advantages - clubs are open later, no fear of DUI, ect. But if I went out 4x a week throughout law school not only would I rack up another $20K in debt, I would be totally fucked (although you can get away with it at the beginning of 1L and probably all of 3L).

[rayiner]

undergrad was a lot more "fun" in the traditional drug abusing/music festival attending/beerpong tournament dominating sense.

there are other ways to have fun?

I was never into music festivals and beer pong. I'm much more into say throwing a dinner party or going to a nice lounge. Luckily tons of people on law school are willing to blow student loan money on $10 cocktails.

[jbagelboy]

undergrad was a lot more "fun" in the traditional drug abusing/music festival attending/beerpong tournament dominating sense.

there are other ways to have fun?

I was never into music festivals and beer pong. I'm much more into say throwing a dinner party or going to a nice lounge. Luckily tons of people on law school are willing to blow student loan money on $10 $22 cocktails.

lol, chicago price index.

and yes, it's good that people mature from collegiate activities.

[jumpin munkey]

I am finishing up 1L and I like law school so far, but I'd add the caveat that I'm not sure I would say the same if I ended up below median first semester -- which obviously a lot of students did. Reading material that you at least kinda enjoy and taking tests that play to your strengths is usually going to be fun. If those don't describe you, then coming back into class in January knowing that you have a lot of money on the line and you're fairly likely to not improve your grades much before OCI must be awful.

[sublime]

..

[Orlandipo]

I'll be that guy.

I hated law school. I hated 75% of my classes, it was a struggle just to get them over with from the very beginning. That went for all three years. The professors were nice, intellectual, and approachable, but I never did bond with them because the coursework was excruciating and uninteresting to me.

Socially, I've never had trouble making friends before or since law school, but I felt alienated pretty much the entire time. I put in a decent amount of effort making friends right at the beginning, but the initial group of cliques just formed around me. I had a couple of acquaintances I was on friendly terms with, but never made any actual friends; there were a couple instances of people who I had never met saying some not-nice things behind my back, but I was otherwise just ignored by the entire rest of my class.

I basically threw everything I had into succeeding academically and still finished outside the top 25%, that happened for both semesters of my 1L year. Afterwords the debt + lack of any realistic shot at OCI left me in my first period of prolonged crippling depression. Most of my 2L year I had a "just get out of bed" type struggle.

About halfway through I came to the conclusion that I absolutely did not want to be a lawyer, but the 2/3rds of my loans had already gone through, and dropping out when you're 2 years and 100k in isn't exactly an enticing option.

Short of being expelled, I can't really imagine how it could have been a worse experience.

[B.B. Homemaker]

I am finishing up 1L and I like law school so far, but I'd add the caveat that I'm not sure I would say the same if I ended up below median first semester -- which obviously a lot of students did. Reading material that you at least kinda enjoy and taking tests that play to your strengths is usually going to be fun. If those don't describe you, then coming back into class in January knowing that you have a lot of money on the line and you're fairly likely to not improve your grades much before OCI must be awful.

Nearly half, I hear.

I've never heard of a school with half below median.

[B.B. Homemaker]

And re: the OP, I like cold pizza so law school is good for that much. Also in my experience it's totally fine most of the time except for a few weeks of suck toward the end or when you have something due. A bit of a roller coaster, but it averages out to be pretty okay.

[beachbum]

I give law school a solid "meh." Your peers are almost uniformly intelligent, accomplished, and often interesting individuals - but they're also prone to pretentiousness, social ineptitude, and constant debate over otherwise minor details. Classes, if chosen wisely, can be genuinely useful, engaging, and interesting - but are (especially 3L year) overshadowed by the fact that you're paying a huge sum of money to sit in these classes, when all or almost all of your real/useful learning is going to occur on the job. There are a ton of opportunities to explore and pursue your interests - but there's a constant pressure (which is created and perpetuated by the law school environment) to spend your time and structure your law school career in a certain way. You may very well graduate with a six-figure salary and the beginning of a promising career - but you may also graduate under- or unemployed, and, in any case, you'll probably walk out with six figures of non-dischargeable debt.

Law school is full of these tradeoffs. And, at the end of the day, law school is basically one giant signaling exercise - from your school, to your grades, to your journal, all of it is designed more to signal your intelligence/ambition to the outside world, and less to engender any useful/practical growth or development in the student. And, especially after 1L, this is exactly how it feels.

So, there you go. A lot of it is what you make of it, but there are definitely certain characteristics that are unique to law school and that are largely out of your control.

[banjo]

I like the material. It's the job anxiety that makes law school suck sometimes.

[beepboopbeep]

went to a private LAC, loved it (while appreciating it's flaws), fine with law school. But I don't think that paradigm holds, unless you're at a tiny school like Chicago or Yale. The 90 person section is a very different experience from the 8-12 person discussion/presentation seminar.

Definitely a lot more g-chat in the former.

No one's on gchat here but that's just because we don't have internet in the classrooms. The amount of 2048 played in class is absolutely nuts, though. I don't say that in a judgmental way - I've been known to play binding of isaac in one class in particular - just in that I don't understand how that game keeps people occupied for literally weeks.

As for the OP, I legitimately enjoy law school. The reading is interesting and the profs have been almost universally engaging. The gunners have calmed down since fall quarter, with a couple exceptions. I imagine it'll only get better once OCI/clerkship hunt is out of the way, when nothing's really riding on grades and we can pick our own classes. But even just taking the basic doctrinal classes has been intellectually fun, as douchy as that phrase sounds.

I know a lot of people see it as this hypercompetitive environment, but that hasn't been my experience at all so far. For the most part everyone's in it together, and there's quite a sufficiency of chill people. I kinda expected the worst w/r/t douchebaggery, but it just hasn't happened. People get snippy around finals, sure. But it's not hard to tune that out, and no one seems especially cutthroat about it.

I'm not sure whether people like law school is the right question to ask, though. It's three years, and while that's not an insubstantial amount of time relative to a whole life, it certainly pales compared to the length of a career. Though it's not like there aren't a million threads about biglaw dissatisfaction already.

[jbagelboy]

I like the material. It's the job anxiety that makes law school suck sometimes.

Do you really feel that much job anxiety tho? I mean, you know you're going to be fine; fear about jobs is hardly the worst part for me. The knowledge that even after I get a job, I'll spend most of the first three years after law school paying off what I borrowed for tuition.. Well, there's absolutely nothing redeaming about that.

[Florence Night]

I'll join the non-fan club. The whole process seems mostly useless. Everything you learn falls into two categories: 1) practically useless for your career or 2) if it is not useless (e.g. civ pro for a future litigator), you're going to forget the ins and outs of it by the time you use it anyway. Also, reading a 10 page case so you can know a 1 sentence holding for an exam is a maddening waste of time, and this mostly describes law school in a nutshell. Congress is more efficient. I don't buy the whole thinking-like-a-lawyer and learning-to-think-critically arguments. Maybe I will someday. But, for now, to me, what you get for what you pay is frustrating (and I'm not even referring to the jobs mess, but to the educational aspect).

Final note: yeah, 2L and 3L years are a vacation for all but the few weeks before finals, so that's nice. But I can do that without paying 6 figures, so it's hard to not be frustrated even if I do enjoy watching Netflix every night.

[chizzy]

Thanks for the responses! But please I don't want the intent of this thread to be diminished. I just asked for love/like cause I've read enough about the bad. Thanks!

[banjo]

I like the material. It's the job anxiety that makes law school suck sometimes.

Do you really feel that much job anxiety tho? I mean, you know you're going to be fine; fear about jobs is hardly the worst part for me. The knowledge that even after I get a job, I'll spend most of the first three years after law school paying off what I borrowed for tuition.. Well, there's absolutely nothing redeaming about that.

Yeah the debt part is pretty bad too. For some reason I've always been more afraid of falling through the cracks. I think the key is not to let it become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

[Rahviveh]

You have a large amount of freedom and flexibility in law school. You are in control of your own time. In that sense law school is a great experience because you can do whatever you want. Even as a 1L you probably aren't working/attending class for more than 8-hours a day, if that. Your freedom is only really constricted when finals are close. There are many things to be bitter/annoyed/jaded about in law school, but once you enroll it's out of your hands and you might as well just accept them. One thing that IMO -and is oft-repeated on TLS - helps lessen the anxiety is to recognize that so much here is out of your control. If you come in with a god complex you are going to be in for a rude awakening.

[chizzy]

You have a large amount of freedom and flexibility in law school. You are in control of your own time. In that sense law school is a great experience because you can do whatever you want. Even as a 1L you probably aren't working/attending class for more than 8-hours a day, if that. Your freedom is only really constricted when finals are close. There are many things to be bitter/annoyed/jaded about in law school, but once you enroll it's out of your hands and you might as well just accept them. One thing that IMO -and is oft-repeated on TLS - helps lessen the anxiety is to recognize that so much here is out of your control. If you come in with a god complex you are going to be in for a rude awakening.

Thanks for the advice. could you elaborate more on the things that are out of my control?

[Rahviveh]

You have a large amount of freedom and flexibility in law school. You are in control of your own time. In that sense law school is a great experience because you can do whatever you want. Even as a 1L you probably aren't working/attending class for more than 8-hours a day, if that. Your freedom is only really constricted when finals are close. There are many things to be bitter/annoyed/jaded about in law school, but once you enroll it's out of your hands and you might as well just accept them. One thing that IMO -and is oft-repeated on TLS - helps lessen the anxiety is to recognize that so much here is out of your control. If you come in with a god complex you are going to be in for a rude awakening.

Thanks for the advice. could you elaborate more on the things that are out of my control?

People with god complexes think that if they had just done things a little differently, there would have been a better outcome. They cannot accept that random variation or elements outside of their control can determine the difference between success and failure. That is not an excuse to come here and be lazy. But to recognize that if you are this kind of person, law school is probably going to be a very unpleasant experience for you. Humility goes a long way.

This really only applies to 1L, I guess. Apparently, nobody gives a fuck about anything post-OCI. But as a 1L I wouldn't know anything about that.

Like a lot of people in this thread, I like law school. I am more worried about what comes after, lifestyle-wise.

[PDaddy]

If you went to a small liberal arts school and loved college, you'll love law school.
If you went to a small liberal arts school and hated college, you'll love law school.

Interested in your explanation for this.

If you hated liberal arts school, it's prolly cause it kicked your ass. Law school will be easy comparatively/nothing new.

If you liked liberal arts school because small like school and intellectual, law school is the same. Clique and just like high school.

If you hated liberal arts because of the small size, then this does not apply to you. But I figure most people wouldn't go to liberal arts school without liking the atmosphere of high school/ small class size.

Ok Lucy...now 'splain your extrapolations regarding the transition from large public to law school. I'm neither buying wholesale nor rejecting your argument, but it's interesting enough. I believe it mostly depends on the individual and his/her circumstances, motivation, major, etc.. External factors over which we have little or no control will always exist, but - as is true with undergraduate studies - external factors are less influential than internal ones. Can we agree on that?

[PDaddy]

You have a large amount of freedom and flexibility in law school. You are in control of your own time. In that sense law school is a great experience because you can do whatever you want. Even as a 1L you probably aren't working/attending class for more than 8-hours a day, if that. Your freedom is only really constricted when finals are close. There are many things to be bitter/annoyed/jaded about in law school, but once you enroll it's out of your hands and you might as well just accept them. One thing that IMO -and is oft-repeated on TLS - helps lessen the anxiety is to recognize that so much here is out of your control. If you come in with a god complex you are going to be in for a rude awakening.

Thanks for the advice. could you elaborate more on the things that are out of my control?

With a little thought (or guesswork), you can probably list some of those on your own. I can imagine that even one's cluster/section may have a domino type of impact on the law school experience, which in turn can impact job/career prospects, which can impact where one resides, who one marries, etc.. It's so strange that seemingly small yet uncontrollable factors can have such a large influence on outcomes. But we can and should only control what we can control.

[worldtraveler]

I went to a large public and liked it and when to law school and liked it. I have no da what's going on with these weird distinctions about who will and won't like it.

[chizzy]

I went to a large public and liked it and when to law school and liked it. I have no da what's going on with these weird distinctions about who will and won't like it.

I think the person was trying to say that law school would be much smaller than a large public school. So it really depends on how much you prefer smaller environments.

[beepboopbeep]

I went to a large public and liked it and when to law school and liked it. I have no da what's going on with these weird distinctions about who will and won't like it.

I think the person was trying to say that law school would be much smaller than a large public school. So it really depends on how much you prefer smaller environments.

I know you weren't the original poster of that distinction, but class size is a pretty minor part of the whole thing for me. You'll be in big lectures first year either way. The question is just whether they're offering two 100-person sections or four.

Size probably matters more (heh) for undergrad, since you can generally trust that people will find some topic that they enjoy. Law school is much more narrowly focused in terms of the work you're doing (at least for 1L), even though the subject matter changes. Your enjoyment of law school depends much more on whether you like the work much more than whether you like the class size.

[Volake]

What the hell? In another thread it seemed like I was quite an oddity for enjoying law school. I'm happy that popular opinion has dramatically changed in the past few months. That or I'm doing some kind of error on the grounds that the thread was asking for people who liked law school.

I've enjoyed law school a great deal. It's a lot of fun to learn about the law and see how different principles and policies fit together in different ways.