The School of Law and The New Leaf

I feel like I should introduce myself or something, as I've never actually posted on this blog it feels a bit like I'm meddling in my wife's things.

My name is Levi, and I lack the discipline, study skills, and contacts to succeed at law school.

Orientation is over and I started official classes for on Tuesday, not owing to my traditional practice during my undergrad years of always skipping 'syllabus week' and only rolling in to class when things started getting interesting. No, this time I started on Tuesday because that's when my classes began and a day missed is a day behind. I rise before the dawn now, I prepare for classes now, in short I have begun the painful process of taping closed the boxes of my childish things.

The classes are difficult, the professors are exquisitely cruel and the material is so dense I fear my backpack is generating its own gravity field. I don't have any new friends that join me in not fitting in and I feel, daily, inadequate to the task before me. Books rounded out at around 1k and, coupled with tuition, gobbled up my entire student loan. Every class period is its own small arena of gruesome defeat; the flop sweat cuts hourly rivers down the bright red, wide-eyed faces of 1Ls caught unprepared.

No one wants to help you study, this is the place of conflict. Every class WILL have an average of 3.3 and the better one's colleagues perform, the further one slips. This is a competitive environment, a zero-sum game. Today, for the first time in my life, I was called upon to answer a specific question for which no amount of waffling, wailing, or gnashing of teeth could conceal a failure to prepare. I stared down a graduate of Yale Law and felt a terror in my stomach as he posed a question about a case I had never read.

I am commuting three hours a day until we get our house. I eat too quickly when I eat at all, and my caffeine habit has taken the opportunity to dig in for the long haul. Lynley worries about my health and I wish I had enough time to apply for the Fed PLUS loan so that we could have health insurance. I watch the sun rise from my decade old economy car in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

This place is stressful; I study out of a twisted, egotistical form of self defense, at night I dream of a law practice that will grind just as hard. My locker doesn't lock and I have books that I read daily just to help me decode the new required reading that I can't understand in my textbooks. People tell me there is a second bathroom at this school, but I've yet to find it.

I'm living with less than half my wardrobe, I can't find most of the possessions I want during any given day, and while I write this I can feel a knot of stress in my stomach because tomorrow is going to be, once again, the toughest day I've ever faced at any school. I've seen the breakdown for my class, and of 131 students only one had a lower GPA than me on admittance. I have more reading to prepare for two class periods tomorrow than I did for a full semester of 18 credits.

I can say, without a shadow of doubt, that I've never been more excited, happier, or ready to dive in with both feet. I love this place already.