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Are Law Students Emotional Wrecks?

Jill

Yes.

“The emotional distress of law students appears to significantly exceed that of medical students and at times approach that of psychiatric populations.” That’s the conclusion of a new study, suggesting that law school has a corrosive effect on the well-being, values and motivation of students.

Yeah, that sounds about right. Good to know I’m not the only one.

47 thoughts on Are Law Students Emotional Wrecks?

  1. Jill, in 1984, as a 21-year-old L – 1, I flunked the first half of contracts. I had never made anything in my life lower than a B +, so this was devastating. I remember I couldn’t even get drunk, so I drove over to Waco’s suspension bridge, walked out to the middle, and seriously considered killing myself by jumping off of it into the Brazos river. I changed my mind only because I thought no one would take care of my favorite African violet. How’s that for screwed up?

  2. Jill,
    You aren’t crazy! I’m a law student as well (I think we are the same age) and I would have to agree – law school has had a corrosive effect on me. It’s less about learning law and more about putting us in a pressure cooker (causing me to want to drop-out ten times a year). So cruel.

    I often spend time wondering how you can be a law student and a blogger – school takes up sooo very much of my time. That is one of the reasons I am such a big fan of yours, I don’t know how you do it! (I’m also a fan because your posts are awesome).

    I don’t mean to turn this into a thread praising Jill, but seriously people, law school is intense and I can barely take care of myself during the year, nevermind taking care of a blog this popular.

  3. I’d say this applies to a lot of people in Ph.D. programs in various disciplines. The experience is not as intensely focused within a defined period of time, as law school is, but is rather drawn out over several years. I don’t know which is worse.

  4. I once stormed into a contracts professors office as a 2L and ordered him to do grade therapy on the 1L’s who were crying in the bathroom after mid-terms. It’s really hard to get bad grades after doing well in undergraduate, and the curve means some people will. HOWEVER, those who believe this is stressful just haven’t practiced. Now a few will be insulated by sitting in back rooms doing research their whole careers, but I have both taken away people’s life savings and watch clients lose everything. Other lawyers will watch their clients get executed. Guess what. You aren’t allowed to cry or otherwise lose your cookies. You have to keep it together and think about how you can help your client, even when there are no good answers. I don’t know if law school really prepares you for this stuff. I don’t know if anything really could. But I do know that you have to get over losing. Because at least one lawyer loses every litigation or criminal case, and you can’t go jump off bridge every time. I cried like a baby when I did not make law review the first time I wrote (I had also missed grading on by .02). I wish I could say steely determination caused me to write again and get on, but I was really just too ego involved to let it go. I did get on. I graduated with honors from a second tier school. Maybe I was motivated by vanity to achieve, but your clients don’t care as long as you, you know, win. Law is about the allocation of society’s resources among competing intetersts without the resort to violence. People who really want to mix it up in that arena, clients or lawyers, will eventually find that a grade on a piece of paper won’t do anything to save you and there are no excuses for losing. If the relentless grind and competition of law school helps you with anything, it’s that. Oh, and I had a blast in law school. Mouthing off in property class is more fun than billing 10 hours some days, trust me.

  5. Yeah, what linnaeus said. I would be curious to see the stats on PhD students; I bet they’d be comparable. And though s/he is right that it’s not as temporally focused overall, the first couple years (i.e., those leading up to qualifying exams) can be extremely intense. Almost every woman I know started seeing a therapist during those years (probably men too, but I haven’t talked with most of them about it).

  6. Ugh, so true.

    I’ve often said that law school, at least here, is less of a typical degree than a gauntlet – Mipa’s pressure cooker analogy is right on the money. After all, there’s always more where you came from.

    I’m especially cynical about this at the moment – I’ve spent the last few weeks utterly freaking out about tomorrow’s Law Exam of Doom, one that seems more designed for its extreme difficulty than test anything that will useful be in practice.

  7. I wonder if this is peculiar to American law school culture. I noticed this first when I started taking out books about law school — the American books described a much scarier experience than the Canadian ones. The truism in Canadian law schools seems to be that “the hardest part is getting in.” (This makes me wonder about the assertion that you can’t be a decent lawyer without going through absolute hell in law school. It’s sort of like the assertion that you’ll inevitably produce unsatisfactory work if you don’t work 80+ hours per week. There’s a whiff of Larry Summers about it.)

    I just finished 1L and although the year had some distinctly not-fun parts, it wasn’t significantly worse than undergrad. Perhaps it helps to be a bit older than 21 and to have had a miserable undergraduate career, as I did (once you’ve seen a few Fs, Cs aren’t that scary, and I never aspired to BigLaw or the Supreme Court anyway). Of course I am also at a small, second-tier school, which takes some of the pressure off.

  8. Yeah, what linnaeus said. I would be curious to see the stats on PhD students; I bet they’d be comparable. And though s/he is right that it’s not as temporally focused overall, the first couple years (i.e., those leading up to qualifying exams) can be extremely intense. Almost every woman I know started seeing a therapist during those years (probably men too, but I haven’t talked with most of them about it).

    FYI, I’m a “he”.

    The first few years are pretty hard-core, to be sure. The dissertation stage is more like a constant background level of stress that’s slightly lower, but stays with you longer.

    I certainly have gone to see a therapist, and I know of at least a couple of other men in either my department or others who have. Probably not as much as women, since men aren’t “supposed” to do that sort of thing (grrr!), but as much or maybe a bit more than in the general population.

  9. The emotional distress of law students appears to significantly exceed that of medical students

    I remember med school and I must say I’m very impressed that law school could be worse than that particular exercise in sadomasochism. How does anyone survive long enough to become a lawyer?

  10. Since beginning Ph.D. work I’ve divorced, ruptured two neck discs (very possibly from reading too much with crappy posture), seen my cholesterol and blood pressure shoot up in spite of regular exercise, been prescribed antidepressants after losing 25 pounds in 4 months, and experienced my first alcoholic relapse after 11 years of sobriety. I haven’t even taken comps yet.

    I’m a humanities major, so I’ll never reap the rewards a law student can. Academia chews us up and spits us out as adjuncts who make about a thousand bucks per class to get no benefits, no job security, and the stink-eye from permanent faculty. I’m really starting to think I should have kept my job at Kinko’s.

  11. Maybe slightly off topic but not totally: It has always amazed me to see how young graduates in the US and, to some extent, in the UK are when they graduate and get a ‘real’ job for the first time. In 1991 when I started at university in Denmark I was 20 and one of the youngest in my department (geosciences, roughly 600 students). I was one of the youngest for the next 2 years as well! Most of my fellow students were 23-27 years old when they started. Most of us had travelled or had had several low-skill jobs or relationships. Most had lived away from their parents for several years. Some even had kids before even thinking of starting at university. The bottom line is that most had some life experience and I definitely had a hard time stressing out about something as ‘mundane’ as getting a university degree. And I even went all the way through to get a PhD.

    I am at UK university now and I’m amazed that so many of the ~21-24 year old PhD students here always talks about the stress of doing a PhD – something I never experienced as a 28-30 year old PhD student. I can’t help wondering if age helps a little bit in this respect? It definitely think it will help you when you come out of university and get your first job: being older (i.e. around 30…) you feel more on par with the employer and you are more comfortable demanding higher salary, more vacation, better benefits etc.

  12. I think part of the stress of law school is a self selection thing. People who come to law school tend to be kind of insecure anyway and then everything gets stirred up and multiplied.

  13. Laurel, I’m really sorry to hear that…I’m also in a humanities PhD program. Remember two things: One, it really does get (somewhat) better after comps. The year before I took them was absolutely hellish, and grad school is still stressful, but NOTHING like it was my first two years.

    And two, you can ALWAYS leave if it doesn’t feel right for you. Really. I know it can feel like that’s failing when you’re surrounded by people in the thick of it and professors who have never known anything else, but it is NOT failing. You have to do what’s right for you. And if you don’t want to leave, you can take a year or two off and work and build up a little more savings to live off of.
    I don’t know how long you have before your exams. There’s something to be said for sticking it out until then (or until you get the masters) but if they’re a year away and you’re absolutely miserable, just remember that you aren’t as trapped as it feels. I’m speaking from a great deal of personal experience.

  14. I know there are many law people here so I don’t mean to offend…but this explains so much regarding how I’m treated at work by some of these folks (I perform background investigations on people taking bar exams across the country). I’ll just leave it at that.

  15. If you think law school is stressful, wait until you have to face the demands of the all-mighty billable hour. You’ll WISH you were back in law school.

    If you’re still in law school, it’s high time to think about exactly what it is you want to do. If high-stress isn’t for you, consider an in-house position, or another form of law practice other than litigation!

    That said, I really wish firms, in particular insuranse defense firms, would re-structure the whole billable hour paradigm. It’s really a drain on talented associates.

  16. bmc90, I think we share an undergraduate alma mater 🙂

    I’ve just finished my 2L year, with a mix of really good to not so great grades. The bad ones are not great for my ego, for sure, but what I’m really worried about is being kept from the kind of work I want to do. I want to work in public interest law, and there seem to be so few jobs out there. I know I have classmates who have all the demonstrated commitment (summer internships, volunteer work etc) that I have, plus better grades. It is stressful, and it makes me competitive and jealous in ways that I thought I had given up in high school.

    Luckily, most of my social circle is not in law school, so I have a break from the insanity sometimes. And yes, when I’m not stressing over exams, school can actually be fun.

  17. Heh, my browser tab actually shortened the title of this post to “Are Law Students Emo…?”

    All jokes aside, I’d be willing to bet that this is an experience more or less endemic to all American graduate schools. I’m a PsyD candidate at an upper-tier professional school and I can say that all the stories I’ve been hearing about contemplating suicide after bad grades and sobbing the the bathroom are pretty commonplace in my neck of the woods, too.

    As someone who went through the greek system as an undergraduate the only thing that comes to my mind is hazing. A lot of the time things are made harder than they need to be simply because its tradition. Sure, you have a few people telling you they’re just toughening you up, or saying that this unfair hell is just preparing you for practice, but theres an element of sadism and retribution thats hard to get away from.

  18. Yeah, at my law school we were mostly all a mess. We would sit around comparing the various inadequate options the school offered for mental health help by the hour–the need was so universal there wasn’t really any stigma involved anymore in admitting we needed the help. Which isn’t to say that it was all bad. And maintaining a social circle outside of law school helped me a lot, too.

  19. I fully believe that law school is worse then med school, and I had a lousy experience in med school. It’s really clear that both end up reducing the student’s capacity for empathy and probably make it harder to maintain relationships – and both the practice of medicine and the practice of law are built on relationships. It’s completely counter-productive. We want – and need- both doctors and lawyers who can listen well and act in someone else’s best interests. When professional education is dehumanizing, it makes that much more difficult.

    Linnaeus is right about grad school, though – I think it’s worse than either one. My husband was a grad student in the physical sciences while I was in med school and residency, and he was far more scarred by the experience. In addition to the academic pressure cooker and the lack of jobs, there’s this bizarre hothouse quality to the relationship with your advisor that’s way too all-or-nothing to be healthy. My husband’s advisor had a pretty narrow worldview; she couldn’t imagine why a serious scientist would have anything to say to a non-scientist. In her opinion, i was a non-scientist. So when she realized he was marrying me, she decided he wasn’t a serious scientist and had no real future in a research institution.

  20. I think the academic grad school experience varies hugely depending on the culture of your department and the relatively sanity/ decency of your advisor. My department used to be really horrible, but a few years before I got there, both students and faculty decided to make a concerted effort to make it more humane. And although my first few years were pretty tough, it’s been ok. There’s a lot of stress, but I think a lot of it is an inevitable byproduct of the job market and of the fact that you know that, even if you get a job, you aren’t going to start making money until you’re nearing middle age.

  21. Bread, we most certainly do. I think one thing that really stressed me out in law school was that I went somewhere ranked lower than our undergradate, so in my mind, I had to do even better. If you want public interest job and are willing to be paid accordingly, I would not stress much at all about your grades. A lot of your classmates in the grade stratosphere are going to follow the money when push comes to shove and pay their loans down or off instead of doing public interest. I will say that as a big firm trained dirt lawyer I feel I have make big contributions in the public interest arena when I have time because I know about real estate and people need a place to live, work and build halfway houses, so there is always an opportunity to help. Law school is so competitive I think you regress to 7th grade emotionally. I missed our undergrad where, frankly, I did not feel I was competing with anyone except myself and the work. I mean, we had two Marshall Scholars – what’s the point in feeling jealous of that? Hang in there. During 3L you just forget about school and look for a job.

  22. Laurel:

    I’m sorry to hear you’re having such a hard time. I know the feeling to some degree; I’ve had dramatic weight fluctuations, been on anti-depressants (as were several of my colleagues), and certainly engaged in some unwise behavior to cope. You know you have to ratchet things down a bit when your favorite bartender casually mentions that her bar had its best night ever when you and your friends were there. I’m a humanist too, so I also know the self-doubt over whether you’ve made the right choice when you take a look at the job prospects ahead of you (though one way to mitigate this problem is to consider non-academic employment).

    Betsy’s right – you can take some time off or leave entirely if it’s just not working for you. It’s hard to do that kind of thing when you’re at the graduate/professional level; you’ve gotten used to doing well at academic things, plus academic culture isn’t kind to those who leave the ivory tower, because the assumption is that it’s due to the fact that there’s something “wrong” with the student. Exams are a big deal and really stressful, but I would suggest that, should you reach the point where you actually take them, the fact that your committee has allowed you to proceed speaks very well of your chances of passing.

    I realize you probably don’t want to read another book, but if you like, I can suggest a few that you might find helpful.

    Though it’s healthy to understand that all of us in professional/graduate school have opportunities, I think it’s clear that grad/professional school can be pretty rough emotionally.

  23. Hahaha. It’s nice to get some external confirmation of what I’ve always suspected: law school turns people into basket cases. Mind you, as noted upthread, a lot of people who self-select into law school tend to be quite grades-oriented and insecure to begin with, but still. This past semester, I fantasized about throwing myself in front of a car fairly often. (A bit messier than bridge jumping, I’ll grant you.)

    With that said, I can’t imagine it’s substantially different than other professional schools (particularly med school) in that respect.

  24. It’s nice to have the validation of hearing that you were right, law school really was making you nuts, but then again a lot of things can make you nuts.

    I just finished my 1L year at a top-tier school, which I only applied to because I wanted to see if I could get in; I’d planned to go to night school because I’m a Non-Traditional Student, aka I was 29 when applying. But then I got into SuperU. Then they let me keep my full-time job at SuperU’s hospital. So I started law school.

    My husband of 12 years moved out the weekend before my first exam last Fall. My daughter turned 12 during exams this Spring. So I spent the year working full time (with co-workers harassing me over my flexible [sic] schedule), going to school full time, watching my marriage finally bite the dust, being a single mom, and basically going batshit crazy. I’d like to thank caffeine, adrenaline, and nicotine for keeping me from failing out.

    My point is, it sucks, but you can do it. And if it sucks and you hate it, no matter what “it” is, then stop. You almost never really have to do something you hate.

  25. My point is, it sucks, but you can do it. And if it sucks and you hate it, no matter what “it” is, then stop. You almost never really have to do something you hate.

    Well… yeah, you can stop, but if you’re like me, stopping means that you go into repayment of your loans — $130,000 worth of loans right now, and climbing. Which, though doable, is certainly a lot more difficult when you don’t have the six-figure law firm salary, or the public interest law job that comes with a loan forgiveness program.

  26. My entire career, I’ve worked in non-profits. I’m the kind of sucker that, likely, will end up always working in one public interest job or another. This is all making my decision to attend a cheap (but not 4th tier) law school — one I can graduate with ~$30,000 in debt — far more appealing.

    — ACS

  27. Jill, yuck and good luck. There were two good things about the second tier school. First, no tuition (I had a scholarship, though I still needed beer money). Second, watching everyone who went to an ivy undergrad get pissed off when our valedictorian ended up being someone raised in a trailer park with tatoos and a sparkly anklet she wore to interviews with law firms who wouldn’t hire her. Yes, she ended up in public interest.

  28. I think one thing that really stressed me out in law school was that I went somewhere ranked lower than our undergradate, so in my mind, I had to do even better.

    Yes, I’ve been thinking this exact thing. (did you stay in the metro area? we may have been at the same law school too).

    If you want public interest job and are willing to be paid accordingly, I would not stress much at all about your grades. A lot of your classmates in the grade stratosphere are going to follow the money when push comes to shove and pay their loans down or off instead of doing public interest

    I hope you’re right.

  29. Laurel,

    I just wanted to second what Betsy said, and say that leaving graduate school is always an option. If your experience in academia is anything like mine, or like most grad students’, you’re surrounded by people who think that the only worthwhile career path is to get a Ph.D. and then become a professor, and anything else is a terrible failing. But that’s just a strange narrow blindness of people in academia. The world is full of intelligent people who never even think of getting a Ph.D.

    That isn’t to say you shouldn’t stick it out if you have a passion for your research, or really like teaching, or have some other good reason for staying in grad school. Just make sure you don’t stick it out just because you think that you have to, which so many people do in grad school.

    By the way, about the discussion of stress levels before and after grad school: I spent many more hours per week working as a professor, after finishing graduate school, but was overall much less stressed. Because in grad schooI I spent a huge amount of time wracked by self-doubt about my abilities, and wondering whether the time I was spending getting my Ph.D. was completely pointless. This was not, I think, an atypical grad school experience.

  30. I was lucky, in that I worked as a paralegal at Baker & Botts in Houston for about 16 months between undergrad and law school, and learned that I in no way ever wanted to try a career in private, associate-to-partner-obsessed practice.

    As a result, I was fine with being a B and sometimes C (and one mystifying A+) student and trying to stay in Austin with a crummy government job. That outlook and avoiding the private firm interview meat market freed up a lot of time for drinking.

    But, at least we’re not indentured servants + having hundreds of thousands in debt like med school students.

  31. If you want public interest job and are willing to be paid accordingly, I would not stress much at all about your grades. A lot of your classmates in the grade stratosphere are going to follow the money when push comes to shove and pay their loans down or off instead of doing public interest

    I don’t think it’s always that easy. I graduated in the top 15 or 20% of my class at an ivy-league law school last spring, and while the job I’m ending up with is not the kind of giant firm job I knew I didn’t want, it’s not the legal services job I was originally looking for, either. I found that I had a *lot* of competition from my classmates and other students from top-tier schools–maybe because our schools have loan forgiveness programs, making it easier to turn down the big firms. Which isn’t to say that it’s impossible, but don’t assume that there are tons of public interest jobs just waiting for you to show up and agree to work at them for $30,000 a year. There just aren’t that many jobs and a lot of public interest organizations are hesitant to hire baby lawyers, since it means such an investment for them in terms of training and supervision.

  32. Yup. It’s one of the great paradoxes of lawyering, at least in New York — graduate from a top school and you can get a job that pays you $130,00 (at least) without a problem. But getting a job that pays you $30,000 requires some serious effort.

  33. I graduated from law school in 1989. It was three years of hell. I graduated in the bottom half of my class (I never did find out what my final ranking was, because if you’re not in the top it really doesn’t matter). I had an extremely hard time finding a job. My parents were blue collar and my experience is that its not what you know, its who you know. Unfortunately, I didn’t know anyone. I finally got a job after seriously considering bankruptcy (and I didn’t even have that much debt). Working for a firm was highly stressful and largely unrewarding. Working as a prosecutor and public defender was even more stressful. All in all, the practice of law simply sucks!

    I am now a lobbyist for a non-profit social justice organization, and while the pay is dismal – my life is much better.

  34. Jill, that was exactly my experience. In the end I wound up with a job that pays me $50,000 but won’t eat my life or make me do anything evil, so I’m happy with that. But I would never have guessed prior to law school that it would be this hard to avoid the big firm trap.

  35. Thanks, Betsy, Linnaeus, and Autumn Harvest, for the kind words. Believe it or not, Linnaeus, I’d love to read a book on the subject…it’ll just take me awhile.

    I know I can make it out in the world. I did that for many years before returning to college to complete my bachelor’s and master’s (when I got the master’s I didn’t realize I’d be continuing or I’d’ve done things more efficiently). I’ve considered taking time off, but I’m at an age now where my brain is not as nimble as it once was. This feels like my last chance. I like teaching except when I loathe it, and my research could be done extracademically. I’m in it to finish what I started, so I won’t always wonder whether I could have.

    My school requires four comps. Last year almost fifty per cent of the takers passed all four the first time, which was some kind of new record. I live in fear of these tests! My dissertation, at least the first draft, is already about two-thirds written, so it’s not a major source of stress (yet).

    Thanks again. If I had other people’s confidence in me I’d have this thing licked.

  36. Meh, I thought law school was kind of fun, after I got over the shock of learning I wasn’t getting an academic degree – law school is definitely geared towards training lawyers. But to be fair, my study sessions typically involved watching TV and heading to the nearest city to do some shopping. Graduated top 1/4 of my class, did the big law thing, and have downshifted into a small boutique firm. Going to a mid-top-tier state school was the best decision eva.

    IMHO, a lot of people took school too seriously – my roommate attempted every day to be the first and last at the library. I kind of took the opposite route. So I suppose my fun should be taken with a grain of salt.

  37. This doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. I got roped into proctoring an LSAT last year, and I needed a massage afterwards. And they weren’t even in law school yet! People were so anxious they got sick and had to leave, people burst into tears, I had to escort the same woman to the bathroom about ten times because she was so nervous. I can only imagine that it’s downhill from there (although I do second whoever said earlier that Canadian law schools aren’t nearly as bad – probably because there aren’t as many, and there isn’t that much competition between schools for prestige).

  38. Very interesting to read about people’s experiences here. I’ve got kind of the opposite problem right now. I’m currently working as an engineer for a large corporation but am really, really disatisfied with the corporate culture and what the company actually does. Plus, they don’t seem to really know what to do with me–I have little to do and, coming from a pressure-cooker undergraduate program, that screws with my head. I don’t necessarily like stress, but I’m accustomed to a certain level and type of work that I’m just not getting anymore. And that generates its own nervousness and stress (I’m about to start seeing a therapist for depression).

    So I’m going back to school! I’m applying to grad school to get a Master’s in a different (but still engineering-related) field. I honestly can’t wait to start–if I get in, that is. We’ll see how I feel in another year or so…

  39. Pingback: Sago Boulevard :: Law Students Are Emotional Wrecks :: June :: 2007

  40. Wow, Laurel, if you’ve got your dissertation 2/3 written before you’re even done with your comps, I don’t think you’ll have too much to worry about, ultimately. 🙂 That’s very impressive (though I’m recognizing that your department is probably on a different schedule than mine – we had our quals at the end of our 2nd year, well before anyone had begun teaching or presented a diss. prospectus). But even so, that’s pretty fantastic.

  42. Let me agree with everyone who says grad school can be pretty hellish. One of the most infuriating things for me is that we’re supposedly doing what we want to do, but the process of grad school itself makes it so damn hard to do just that.

  43. Congrats, Dr. Confused! You got the big poofy dress! I swear that the prospect of getting one of those (someday) is all that keeps me going sometimes.

  44. Laurel (and anyone else who’s interested):

    Here’s a couple for starters:

    Barbara E. Lovitts, Leaving the Ivory Tower. Lovitts herself entered and dropped out of two graduate programs before earning a Ph.D. at her third school. This book was her dissertation. It’s a really good exploration of why graduate students leave Ph.D. programs, why they stay, how they cope, etc. Even if you have no plans to leave, Lovitts’ insights are informative and comforting. Let’s just say she has quite a few words for graduate programs.

    Susan Basalla and Maggie Debelius, “So What Are You Going To Do With That?” Finding Careers Outside Academia, rev. ed. I just got this; it’s a short, quick read, but there’s lots of good suggestions on how to reinvent yourself if you’ve pretty much determined – like me – that you don’t want to go into academia.

    There’s also Margaret Newhouse’s Outside The Ivory Tower. I haven’t read it yet, but Basalla and Debelius say it’s helpful and worth a read.

  46. Bread and Jill, I think you are just in a very different job market geographically from the state where I graduated re public interest jobs. There are a fairly discrete number of law schools in a very large state with a lot of public interest needs. If that’s what you want someday, practicing with a private firm might make you a more attractive candidate. Fact is, a lot of positions like public defender have a high burn rate so there are always openings.

  47. Great post. I got this from a friend in e-mail, too.

    The hazards of law schools are something people do to themselves. Most law students have a horrible fear of failure; at the best law schools, you will find a huge number of students who got straight A grades in high school, went to fantastic, world-renowned universities, and came into law school with all engines blazing. Especially the youngest among them may, in fact, never have failed at anything in their entire lives. These are bright kids who have been told by their parents their entire lives that they… are… destined… TO LEAD!

    Coincidentally, this is also the first time many law students encounter a mandatory curve. The combination is a semester-long Sword of Damocles.

    I’ve enjoyed law school more than most. Whether this has anything to do with the fact that paragraph #2 doesn’t describe me (like, at all), I’ll never really know. But I suspect having rogered one’s own life many times before law school enables a certain calm about the process. When missing a brass ring is no longer the worst thing you can imagine, none of this is as scary.

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