My grades are meh. I actually did pretty well second semester, but first semester dragged me down and now my grades are barely above the bottom third. They say that you call the person in medical school with the lowest grades "Doctor." Well, they may call me lawyer but it will be hard to enjoy that victory from my cot at the Y.
Anyway, now we move into what is called OCI. That is where, from what I've experienced so far, law firms that you don't even remember applying to send you rejection letters.
Let's see... law school.
- I was the only black guy in all but one of my classes over the course of the entire year. Downside: it wears at you. Upside: When I don't participate, professors typically just assume that I'm dealing with stereotype threat instead of playing Mass Effect 2.
- The arrogance and pretension can be pretty bad sometimes but not always. Moreover, some of the people that you thought you would never be able to get along with turn out to be pretty cool. On the other hand, you're usually right when you label someone as a doughy, bitter conservative with a chip on his or her shoulder about not getting into Yale.
- The people here are smart but they're not that smart. There are a handful of geniuses here. I say that only because statistically that must be true. Instead, it seems that the high performers here typically either studied 12 hours a day or came from a lawyer background and just knew what exams were going to be like back to front. The rest of us had to offer up fall term grades as a sacrifice.
- Everybody in law school has at least one diagnosable mental malady. For many of us, it's narcissism, but there some good old-fashioned batshit crazy running around here.
- The law is many things, but it isn't hard. Trying to regularly beat other people on a subjective exam might be hard, but the law is quite easy. Most of the rules can be stated in 20 words or less. This is a problem because it negates the need for lawyers. To make up for this, we deliberately obfuscate the rule by either stating it in latin or using the rule as stated by Judge X, where Judge X is 100 years old and couldn't care less whether he has stated the rule concisely and clearly.
- In each of your classes, there will be one person who (1) thinks he's much smarter than he is; and (2) likes dropping knowledge bombs on people. In a just world, I could murder this person when, during his 10 minute monologue during Criminal Law, he manages to mention that his parents are lawyers, that he already knew the answer to the question he's asking, and that he published a paper during undergrad.
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