First Semester Aftermath

If you don't know why his picture's leading off this post, Google him and find out. Then you may return for the rest of this post.

Before I begin, I wish for everyone reading this to have the best of years in 2010.

Although I’m only about a week away from starting back up with my spring semester classes, I just wanted to note my completion of my first semester of law school. It was a long, crazy ride, to say the least.

To those that say that law school changes the way you look at many things, I think you’re at least right in my case. My approach to watching programs on TV such as the legal issues of sports figures became a lot more critical, as I now have the knowledge to reason through what is most likely going on in their legal disputes.

Even in my everyday activities, legal principles arise in my brain rather quickly. The first time I drove my car after we finished discussing negligence in my Torts class, I made absolutely sure that I took all necessary precautions to ensure I wasn’t driving negligently should any accident occur. Yeah, I know, it sounds fairly paranoid. Blame law school.

Thankfully, despite not having anyone in my immediate family that attended law school, family gatherings weren’t dominated by discussion of what I was doing in law school.

I was pleasantly surprised that my section was filled with pretty good classmates. The classic description of one’s law school classroom is that there’s always "gunners", always willing to show off their knowledge of the subject and provide input, no matter how useless, to whatever discussion the professor has going at the moment. On the contrary, classes always seemed pretty civil and not dominated by a couple students. As always, I have to make a sports parallel; it was a team effort making it through our various classes this semester.

The law school curve does have me somewhat worried about grades (I should know what they are shortly after returning for spring semester). Thus, I tried not to carry on much discussion, if any, with classmates regarding how hard we thought the test was or how we answered particular questions. Really, any discussion seemed rather unproductive to me; the only person who truly knows and determines how well we did on the final exam is the person grading the exam: the professor. I’m hoping greatly that I can get a pleasant surprise soon from my grades. Good grades definitely would make me feel confident not that the big, high-paying firms will take a serious look at my resume, but that a wider range of good legal jobs will be more easily available to me.

I tried not to make this post too long; it’s merely to serve as my recognition, review, and basically celebration of completing my first semester of law school. Will it become more tolerable as the next semesters pass, as many say it does? I sure hope so...