Law School is Trying to Kill Me - 1L
Hey Sunnies,
I hope this blogpost finds you well. So this post is dedicated to why 1L tried to kill me. If you haven’t had a chance to read the intro to this series you can find it here. Yalllllll, 1L tried to whole heartedly take me out of the game. If you aren’t fimiliar with the law school structure, 1L is your first year of law school. There are three years, 1L to 3L respectively, to get to that JD.
First and foremost, the work. Now this seems so simple. Most people have a basic understanding that law school means lots of reading. Even I knew law school would require me to read about 25 hours a week. But y’all, I got to school at 8am, read from 8am to 10:00am, had class from 10:00am to 12:00pm, read from 12:00pm to 2:00pm, had my class from 2:00pm to 4:00pm and tried to stay in the library to study until around 7:00pm or 8:00pm every day! I didn’t expect that one! And that’s honestly the minimum, it’s likely you won’t get all of your readings and assignments done in this time frame alone. So that means Saturdays and Sundays of reading and studying. The work load is quite ridiculous. At times it felt impossible. I was completely overwhelmed and would usually find someone or be the one having a small mini-panic attack because they didn’t get their reading done before class.
This is the perfect transition until the next horror, social anxiety. Everyone in law school is pretending they know everything, when the reality is no one knows anything. The sky won’t fall if you are cold-called—meaning your professor randomly calls on you to recall the facts of the case, recite the legal theory, maybe even defend the dissenters—and you don’t know the answer. It’s a “sarcastic method” that invites participation from the whole class. Anyway, it’s stressful. You’re sitting in class with anxiety at an all time high that you will be called on and not know the answer. The reality is no one cares, even your professor knows you won’t always have the answer—I mean they surely expect that you’ve adequately prepared for class—but they know you don’t know everything. The social anxiety comes in because you don’t want to look dumb in front of your classmates. Especially 1L year when you don’t know your classmates or who actually is smart and whose family CLEARLY finessed them in.
Y’all, for me, it was first time going to school with white people and that right thereeeeeeee was a whirlwind on its own. I’m from Detroit, the BLACKEST CITY IN THE COUNTRY. I am a proud product of Detroit Public Schools. Then, I went to Howard University, the BEST HBCU in America. I have never had an academic experience where I have been the minority. Well, law school quite quickly changed all of that. I can’t explain how out of place I felt, how confused I was by the way people thought and how behind I was with the basic understanding of how the legal system worked in this country.
All of these contributed to the many times I thought to myself, maybe I should drop-out and try law school again later in life. I even thought about just taking a semester off and figuring out why I came to law school in the first place. It was brutal! Then to top it all off, there was an INTERNATIONAL PANDEMIC IN MARCH! Ya’ll I can’t even make this stuff up. Find out more on the next post in the series.
forever blooming,
Mikaela Amira
