Dear 2Ls,
Your third year of law school is an incredible opportunity and you must not waste it.
SHOULD YOU CARE ABOUT YOUR GRADES AT THIS POINT?
Grades are a means to an end. They have zero intrinsic worth. That’s pretty self evident, but it’s also hard to act on. Most of us have spent the good part of our lives on this great pavlovian treadmill called education where the only consistent metric of your intelligence and prospect of future success has been your grades. But as you near the end of your education, the rationale for pursuing good grades is unraveling.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t give a fuck about your grades at all. But you owe it to yourself to do an honest accounting of whether “good grades” provide any utility to your life at this point. If you have an articling position secured at the end of 2L summer, and don’t see yourself going back to school, odds are no one will ever care about your grades again. If so, you should invest your time more rationally.
GREAT – YOU HAVE FREED ME FROM THIS DEEP MENTALPRISON. NOW WHAT?
With some careful planning, you can spend 80% of your year completely ignoring your academic commitments, if you are willing to work very hard 20% of the time. How?
- Pick classes that have no attendance requirement. Duh.
- Pick classes for which you already have good notes/maps/summaries. Look at the SLS database when choosing your classes, and ask upper years for any good notes, maps, or summaries that they may have. Choose accordingly.
- Are you able to set time aside to quickly finish papers? Then do only paper courses. Always take too long with papers but a good exam writer? Take only exam courses.
- Don’t go to class.
Obviously the catch is that you will need to bust your ass during exam period trying to learn entire areas of law in a few days. But, assuming you worked at a firm over the summer, you’ll know how to do that because that’s what lawyers do all the time. Law requires you to quickly learn a great deal about an area of law (especially the sort of work you’ll be doing as a summer or articling student) – why not practice that?
And in any case, for many of you, this already approximates how you study right now. You might go to class, but you’re on facebook half the time and not taking good notes. If you’re not getting something out of lectures, don’t go, and learn it all at the end like you do already.
SOLD. BUT WHAT ELSE AM I GOING TO DO?
Congratulations. You have arranged for a year of near absolute freedom. DO NOT WASTE IT.
1. Develop another career
Having doubts about committing your whole life to the law? Me too. Now is the perfect time to explore and develop other career paths. 3L is the best chance you will ever have to develop the skills, experience, and connections that could lead you into another career. Once you are working, it will be that much harder to abandon the practice of law if you have no other way to step out of it.
2. Commit to a law school extracurricular
Are you invested in an extracurricular at law school? A journal, a clinic, SLS, or a profitable and prestigious newspaper? Imagine how much you could do for your chosen extracurricular if you had a whole year to spend with it. The biggest problem that faces most law school student institutions is that no one has any damn time to really commit to it, to invest in that institution, to make it better. What could you do for your club if you spent 80% of the semester treating it like a real job?
3. Be happy
Travel. Rekindle old friendships. Read those books you haven’t had a chance to read for the last two years. Develop a new skill or hobby. Go to the gym regularly and lose the weight you’ve gained over the last two years. Spend more time with your family. Spend a day or two a week just doing nothing. Fall in love, or spend more quality time with those you love already.
THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE
Now that sounds really fucking dire. But for many of us, it’s true. We’re starting our careers, for real this time, and you are not going to have a whole year to freely pursue whatever you desire for a long, long while. At the very least, you’re probably going to work pretty hard for a few years in your law job to pay down your debt, before you have to decide between gunning for partner, moving firms, or switching careers entirely. At that point, most of you will, like me, be about 30. You might be married. You might be buying property. You really think you’re going to have time to spend a whole year doing whatever the fuck you want at that point? Not likely people. Get real with yourself. LIVE YOUR LIVES TODAY.
BUT DON’T PRETEND THAT THERE IS NO COST HERE
You will not learn as much. You will not be around school as much. You will miss out on making connections with professors that could prove useful in your career. You will not get to hang out with friends in class as much. I really miss that. You will miss out on gossip, popular references, and become detached to some degree from the culture of your school.
CONCLUSION
Do whatever is best for you. But please, please, make a deliberate choice. Don’t go to class and try to get B+’s and A’s just because that’s all you’ve ever done. Invest your limited time wisely. You owe yourself that.
