My 1L Year: Nothing Is More Powerful Than An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Today is my final day of class for my 1L year of law school. So much has happened in this year and it has all happened so quickly that it is sometimes difficult to realize that things have changed.  Even though classes are coming to an end, my heart is racing constantly and my brain won't take a break because finals are looming ahead. In an effort to slow the panic, I have decided to attempt to reflect on the past year, in both personal and academic lights.

My first day of orientation was in mid August.  I had just gotten back from a trip from Iowa, visiting my mom and making sure she was settled in with her cancer treatments.  She had begun to have seizure like tendencies which inhibited her speaking ability.  When I called my mom that morning to tell her about my nerves, hopes, expectations, she was unable to respond with more than a few mumblings.  I called my mom's best friend who gave me the words of support I know my mom was wishing she could share.  I had spent so much time on my initial assignments, making sure I did each of them to the best of my ability, that I was sure they were all wrong.  At the time, they were exactly what they should have been.  Looking at them now, I was right, they were all wrong.  

I was terrified but optimistic.  I had been told to meet up with a girl who was the daughter of my boyfriend's mom's friend.  As fate would have it, I met the closest thing I had to a familiar face in the elevator before we even made it out of the parking garage.  Though we ended up having different interests throughout the year and made other friends, it was so nice to have someone to talk to about the process and not walk into the classrooms alone.  I remember thinking about who would be in my section, whether my first impressions would last, and who my real professors would be.  

On the first day of class, my boyfriend took my picture on our doorstep and drove me to school.  All over again, walking into the front doors of the school, I wanted to cry and run away as much as I wanted to jump up and down with excitement.  I had waited my entire life for this day.  It's strange now, how little I remember about that day when I had spent most of my life dreaming about what it would be like.  It went so quickly that I'm not entirely sure what classes I had that day.  I think it was Torts and Crim but I could be wrong.

Soon, our class started to settle into a routine.  We started to figure out our professors and expand our friend groups and interactions.  We found that our Contracts professor had some ups and our Civ Pro professor showed his passion like the Lorax.  On Thursdays, we had both of these classes so they became known as Passion Thursdays.  

We started Word of the Day and tried in each class to work the Word of the Day into the class conversations without the professor knowing.  My favorites were probably "groovy" and "vinyl." I ran for and won the position of 1L Representative for our class section on the Student Bar Association, which is essentially the student government.  I started a Facebook page for our section and, despite the inevitable vying for grades that would happen at the end of the term, everyone banded together to tackle our first semester.  

As midterms approached, we were given a template for our final exams.  As much as I was terrified and focused for those exams, I had no idea how little a role they played in our final grades.  Realistically, if I had done better on a few midterms, perhaps my final grade would have been higher, but it gave us an inkling of what was to come for finals and I was able to prepare so much better for final exams.  Judging how each professor graded was at least as important as actually knowing the material.  This is something that is haunting me and terrifying me for this semester.

I got the opportunity to spend Thanksgiving in the San Francisco area with my dad's side of the family. Getting out of town and just taking some time to see family that I hardly get to see was so refreshing and helped me to get my head focused for the last few weeks of school before finals.  

I was able to meet many area lawyers and get involved in a legal community I had little knowledge of before beginning school.  

Winter break somehow flew by and was still littered with concerns about school as our grades trickled out over the four weeks we had "off."  Despite one class crushing my heart and shattering my self-definition, I made honor-roll.

Coming back second semester, dynamics had changed a bit.  Each person had a different outlook.  Some became more welcoming, now used to the law school game; others gripped more tightly to their friend groups.  Others couldn't adhere to those tight grips and so became a "free agent" on the study group market.  

Barrister's Ball allowed us to feel fancy for an evening, connect with some professors outside of the classroom, and connect with each other.  Barristers became a defining evening for me this year.  I decided at that point what school groups I wanted to be involved in, what level of commitment I was prepared to offer those groups, and what I needed to do to get there.  In some cases, this meant simply finding social situations that made me happier and reminded me of my passions.  I needed to surround myself with people who understood those passions and who had similar ones.  Despite everyone being in law school, hopes, dreams, personalities, and goals are as diverse as any undergraduate institution could offer.  Just as my English major occasionally gathered snickers from my Bio major friends, not everyone has the ability to be supportive of my Crim law and litigation goals when their goals are so undecided or decided to the point where they know that what I want is definitely not what they want.  Just as after the first few weeks of school in the fall friend groups reshuffled, it happened a bit in the spring as well, all for the best.  We all grew into our 1L selves.  We had all changed from the first few weeks of school, created new goals, and new paranoias.  

Over spring break, I volunteered as a witness for the mock trial team.  After sitting in on two of their practices, I knew that that was what I wanted to do with my life all day every day.  Fortunately, I realized, this is why I am going to law school.  As obvious as it seems, something finally clicked in my mind as to why I was truly here.  I realized that my five year plan includes a real career, not an educational career.

Somehow, Midterms came quickly, Spring Break flew by, and all of a sudden, we were faced with a few fingers worth of weeks until finals.  Professors taught differently this semester.  I am not sure whether it is because we had one semester under our belts and they wanted us to up our game or whether it was simply because the information was different but we had more detailed work to do outside of class and gained less information in the classes themselves.  My family found out that my mom's cancer had returned and she is continually going through new treatments.  Despite it weighing on my mind, that mind needs to be focused on my upcoming finals.

All the while, I had my animals and family and boyfriend supporting me from outside the school realm. God bless each of them for putting up with my psycho habits that I have developed.  Requiring certain things to be clean on certain days and time to myself before I ripped someone's head off were all things that everyone dealt with and yet, they still talk to me.  I can't thank them enough for that.  

Next year I will face new challenges.  I will be serving as the Treasurer for SBA, the President for the Women's Law Association, and, hopefully, I will be participating in Mock Trial.  In the next two weeks my challenges will include keeping dry eyes when I want to curl up in a ball and quit, keeping my cats off my butcher paper as I wallpaper my home with charts, outlines, and diagrams, and not letting the terror of defeat overcome my hopes to succeed.

My favorite quote which seems to apply to every point in my life still motivates me today.  

"I wanted a perfect ending.  Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end.  Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next.  Delicious Ambiguity." - Gilda Radner.