Not in Kansas anymore

Law school isn't college. But college isn't high school. High school isn't middle school. Blah blah blah. Like most people, I grew up being inundated with warnings from teachers and older students alike about how "not like" some new environment was compared to the previous one. "You're not children anymore. You're adults" is probably the most overused statement of every middle school, high school, and college orientation. So the whole "law school isn't college" warning didn't carry as much weight with me as much as it probably should have.

So what's the reality? The reality is that law school is whatever you want it to be. If you treat it like college, it'll be like college. If you treat it like a job, it'll be like a job. When I talk about "treating something like XYZ," I'm talking primarily about how students approach their workload and school-related responsibilities. Social habits and leisure time is individual-specific and from what I've seen isn't really connected to how you approach your studies. Some of my hardest working classmates get wasted regularly...and some of my laziest classmates stay home on weekends reading literature. Yup it's true, nerds can be stupid. Which sort of negates their only redeeming quality (that they're supposedly smart).

Anyway we've already established that law school becomes what you make it. But you'll be doing yourself a disservice if you treat law school like college, because law school is fundamentally different from college in terms of workflow and structure. This isn't Kansas anymore.

In college, you get homework. You take unit exams. Daily quizzes. Papers. Group projects. All your classes are conveniently segmented so that you can hop scotch from one assignment to the next. There are consequences for not completing them. My university forced me to take a bunch of classes I didn't care about and wasn't relevant to my career (e.g. biology...medieval literature...MATH). So as an undergraduate I just did the work that needed to be done, when it needed to be done, and just played in between. The work wasn't especially hard. I wasn't especially interested in most of the subjects. Easy peasy. In college you play all the time and work when you need to. So don't ever leave college. Ever.

In law school you work all the time and play when you can...which is almost never. There's no homework, which means your workflow is completely up to you (which usually means you end up working all the time). The stakes are high because most people are borrowing a lot of money to attend and because legal hiring is extremely grade-sensitive, especially for higher paying jobs. Law school is the ultimate trap for procrastinators. Zero structure and extremely high stakes.

And you're not just working all the time. You're working all the time learning the same thing with the same people. Needless to say, it becomes suffocating. All your classmates are taking the same classes, studying the same subjects. Your daily schedule is centered around mastering the same 3-4 disciplines. So gym time, meals, fun, Skyping with friends back home, walking your dog, bar hopping etc... all of that takes a backseat to the questions "Can I finish this Torts reading by a reasonable hour? Do I need to outline Contracts tonight, or will I remember it long enough to do it tomorrow?"

If it sounds miserable it's because it is sometimes. Burnout is a real thing here since you're actually working. In undergrad the only times I ever experienced "burnout" was when I put off some major assignment until the night before. So it was self-inflicted.  But here? I'm burning out just trying to keep up. But then I think about what the med students are going through and all of sudden everything is okay again.

There's a silver lining though (if you want to call it that). The reality is that you go to law school because you want to be there (presumably). And it's easier to study a subject when you know it's directly relevant to your future and you're studying it voluntarily...unlike Statistics 201 or Literature 300. So it's not too bad. Especially if you meet and work with the right people...but that's a topic for a different day.

If you're reading this as an undergrad. Seriously, never leave. Kansas is so much more fun.