9/03/2005

A Few Things I Learned Today

Back "home" for the long weekend, so I can recuperate and feel a bit of normalcy after two very stressful and overwhelming days. My three years of working for the little start-up has made me used to a lot of solitary work, and the constant interaction with strangers was very exhausting and not altogether pleasant.

Had dinner on Friday at my prof's very large and very gorgeous house. The entire day on Friday, in fact, was filled with a lot of free food and (not always good) alcohol. The girl from California whom I met on Thursday, J, and I hung out most of the time. Nearly everything reminded me of my first few days at my undergraduate college.

Today I had dinner / coffee with friend J, who is also in law school and a 3L. Talked about law school culture, strategies, and clerkships (J is applying for clerkships). Here are some pearls of wisdom from him:

- Even though people in law school may be nice to your face, people are often secretly very competitive and will do very morally dubious things to get ahead.

- When choosing friends in law school, it's very important (in fact, most important) to find people who are stable, self-assured, and not insecure. Whether or not they are smart or like the law or like law school etc., is all secondary or unimportant.

- Practice taking old exams, as early as possible.

- There will always be people who despise other people who appear to be enjoying or thriving in law school more than them. You need to decide early on how you are going to relate to these people and/or this practice.

(J., being very self-confident and assertive, decided that he would ignore these people and just do what he would always do. I'm not sure I'm quite so brave.)

- The clerkship process is INSANE. (Glad that I don't have to worry about that for a couple of years -- though even then it's not entirely a bad problem to have.)

Have been reading on and off my reading assigments for Tuesday (and slacking off a lot, sadly). Perhaps tomorrow I will work out a schedule for myself.

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