Post 1 of One Year At Law School: Dealing with the Disillusionment

I know this girl who left one of the best of the national law schools (let’s just call it Bla-Bla shall we and no, I am not taking any perverse pleasure in calling this premier institution Bla-Bla). One of our earliest conversations went like this:

Me: So you left Bla-Bla for this (for the record I have the utmost respect for this but compared to bla-bla, this was no competition)

Her: Yes.

Me: ARE YOU CRAZY???

Her: It just wasn’t what I expected it to be.

Me: I repeat, ARE YOU CRAZY???

I still don’t know whether her choice was for the better, but I do understand it better now. There’s a lot of disillusionment attached to our first reception of law and law schools. For a lot of us, doing law from what are purported to be the best institutions in the country is an idea that appeals to our Perry Mason/Boston Legal/ John Grisham/ Insert own law fantasy book, movie , TV show addled brain. The University has to be a cut above the rest, the education offered in it a brilliant dazzling epiphany, its professors have to be compelling illum…er… you get the picture?

All this codswallop hope that you have of the place crumbles before your first lecture in the place gets over. Actually sometimes it happens a lot faster.

Imagine sixty odd fresh from school lot cramped into a tiny class room in the middle of summer waiting for there first lecture.

Instead of the wizened old professor, in walks well…I know appearances should not matter but seriously…

Hello! I AM CHOCKO!!!

One permanent grin and countless pjs after, everyone is rearing back in their seat in abject horror. It’s so hot that it a human rights violation to hold us in class and Chocko has long ago started talking in Latin…like really.

I can say with utter certainity that I know at least one person who made up her mind to call it quits right after the first day in class and quite a few did the same in the months that followed.

Disillusionment …heaps of it. In all shapes and sizes. I guess a huge amount of it stems from having their fantasies of the place broken. For a lot of us, getting into law school has been a long term plan; they worked their arses off to get through the competitive exam and they are entitled to dream about this place.

Weirdly enough, I turned out to be one of the few who escaped the initial disillusionment bug. This may have a lot to do with the fact that I had never ever not in a million years thought I would be studying law! Law school kinda just happened (not that I didn’t work my arse off, but it still was a lot more eleventh hour than the ordinary). So I didn’t have that many great fantasies of the place and in a way I guess I got lucky.

Truth is I think as far as law is concerned (and maybe it holds through for most courses too) you have to give it time. I’ve heard a lot of my seniors say that if you can get through the first semester of law school, without cracking, you’re gonna be okay. That probably is the best attitude.

And law takes time to grow on you. It takes time to go through a sixty page judgement (oh come on, I was in first year! I am not going to read some insanely big judgement!) and to finally decipher the sheer subtle brilliance of the reasoning behind it or to read a1760 case and marvel at the fact that the judgement holds to this very day.

And though you may never really understand what Chocko taught you in class you might discover much to your surprise that the guy for all his ranting on setting the hardest paper ever, is still a softy when it comes to correction and more importantly unless you actually take his optional papers (in which case you really are crazy), you only have one more class with him in the five years that follow.

Awful

I was going to crib about the A-awful exam paper I wrote. About how I messed it up, and messed it up badly! I was going to crib about how Awful I felt after the exam, that I didn’t even feel the sickening high that comes post depressive paper where amidst cheery pop music you decide that you are going to do better the next time. I was going to crib about how I just curled up after that on my bed drinking way too much Lemon Tang and watching back to back episodes of Gossip Girl (Sympathy T.V anyone?) and how I woke up late today with no work done and one hell of a lemon tang – gossip girl combined hangover…going Ugh…Ugh…Ugh

But my darling mum just called to tell her wayward child how utterly she does not care if the said child screwed up her paper and she can hardly wait to have her wayward daughter back home so that she can fill her up with family gossip and home cooking.

I’ve got three more awful papers to go and three more awful study sessions to go with them and I am just dreading it. But I know it’s going to be okay and that’s a start.

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Ps: Oh and Gossip Girl…Yeah…I like Chuck…That’s Right…Chuck! There is something fundamentally wrong in saying that out loud. I am victim of the bad boy act. Sigh.

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Incidents of Inconsequentiality

 

 

 

                                                              He was middle aged, probably a little younger than my dad, wearing a badly crumpled blue shirt and cream pants. He’d buttoned the shirt right into his neck and it looked like the buttons would pop if he so much as took a deep breath. Short, balding and utterly tragic.  Not by his appearance, mind you, but simply by what he did for a living.

 

                                                            He was the Frequently Asked Question answering living breathing version of a popular legal website. He was part of the standard package – a default option. The university prescribes to our website we send our representative to explain the intricacies of using it to you. The problem of course arises as there aren’t any real intricacies – it is a search tool. How hard could it be? And so the few who turned up for the demonstration were the odd stragglers – the one who’d been bribed into attending with the promises of plates of Maggie or a free coke.

 

                                                                   And the point is the website was as alien to him, as it would be for any first time user. In the sense, he had never actually used it for any real reason. He’d probably been given a crash course on How to Instruct On How to Use the Legal Website and send out to meet the pack of hyenas.

 

 

                                                So there he was, sincere in his efforts to explain how to use the website to a group of people who could care less. People messaging, laughing, staring off into space, looking at their watches; We weren’t actually being rude on purpose, it was just so useless that no one could even fake interest.

 

                                         And you could see, that he got that too. That no one really cared about what he was saying, that he could probably slip in a verse of how the optimum way to use the website was when one was naked and no one would even blink. It was sad, to watch him, stuttering at the sight of blank faces, desperately pleading for questions in the cold silence. It was sad that this poor middle-aged man had to do such a thankless job.

 

I am not trying to sound high and mighty, like some better off individual who is looking down at the lesser mortals and trying to analyse their position. In fact it was one of those days …just after you’d been bested out of something and were feeling blue anyways, that this demonstration happened. And I guess what I felt for that total stranger with his crumpled blue shirt and cream pants applied to me at the point…

It  sucks to be inconsequential .

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