Advice from a 2L About Admit Weekends
Posted: Mon Apr 15, 2013 4:19 pm
To all of you attending admit weekends and open houses, congrats! It is a very exciting time, and I hope you found a school that is a great fit for you. As a current 2L at a T5 law school, I just wanted to make a couple of suggestions to those of you who still have admit weekends ahead of you:
1) Please do not participate in class. We know it is really exciting to finally be seeing what it will be like when you come to law school, and to maybe be in a class about something that really interests you. We share your enthusiasm. But here's the thing: if you are sitting in on a real class, this class has almost certainly been going on for several weeks/months, and is likely based on a long reading assignment that you have not done. You therefore extremely unqualified to be answering questions about the reading, or to be participating in class discussion. We understand how exciting it is to be in a law school class, but please understand that we have to get through a certain amount of reading during each class, so when you ask a question going off on a tangent about something you once heard about a criminal law case, you are truly wasting everyone's time. The professor will not remember you (we are lucky if they know our names), so you are not winning any points with them. But the more often you pipe up in class, the more likely it is that we (the future 3Ls and 2Ls) will remember you (negatively). If you have a genuine question or even if you want to get some face time in with the professor, there is time for that after class. Something you will learn in law school is that you are probably no longer the smartest person in the room. Now is a good time to embrace that and listen to what the professor and the people who have done the reading have to say.
2) If you have legitimate questions about how we feel our experiences at this law school compares to the experience of others at other law schools, we are happy to answer them. If you want to know what went into our calculus when choosing a law school, we are happy to share that. But you are not the first person by a long shot who has had to choose between HYS/Columbia/etc, so please don't try to brag that you have been accepted to all of those places. So were we. And we (quietly) made the choice we thought was best for us, which is what you should do. These weekends are fact-finding missions during which you can assess which school is the best place for you, not a forum in which to brag to us that you have been accepted to other prestigious schools. We truly do not care.
You might be surprised about how many people remember when you behave in an obnoxious manner, particularly in law school. The people you meet in here are going to be your professional colleagues for your entire career, so it might be worth taking some time now to think about how you want to be perceived by them.
1) Please do not participate in class. We know it is really exciting to finally be seeing what it will be like when you come to law school, and to maybe be in a class about something that really interests you. We share your enthusiasm. But here's the thing: if you are sitting in on a real class, this class has almost certainly been going on for several weeks/months, and is likely based on a long reading assignment that you have not done. You therefore extremely unqualified to be answering questions about the reading, or to be participating in class discussion. We understand how exciting it is to be in a law school class, but please understand that we have to get through a certain amount of reading during each class, so when you ask a question going off on a tangent about something you once heard about a criminal law case, you are truly wasting everyone's time. The professor will not remember you (we are lucky if they know our names), so you are not winning any points with them. But the more often you pipe up in class, the more likely it is that we (the future 3Ls and 2Ls) will remember you (negatively). If you have a genuine question or even if you want to get some face time in with the professor, there is time for that after class. Something you will learn in law school is that you are probably no longer the smartest person in the room. Now is a good time to embrace that and listen to what the professor and the people who have done the reading have to say.
2) If you have legitimate questions about how we feel our experiences at this law school compares to the experience of others at other law schools, we are happy to answer them. If you want to know what went into our calculus when choosing a law school, we are happy to share that. But you are not the first person by a long shot who has had to choose between HYS/Columbia/etc, so please don't try to brag that you have been accepted to all of those places. So were we. And we (quietly) made the choice we thought was best for us, which is what you should do. These weekends are fact-finding missions during which you can assess which school is the best place for you, not a forum in which to brag to us that you have been accepted to other prestigious schools. We truly do not care.
You might be surprised about how many people remember when you behave in an obnoxious manner, particularly in law school. The people you meet in here are going to be your professional colleagues for your entire career, so it might be worth taking some time now to think about how you want to be perceived by them.
