The Reasonably Prudent Law Student

Yesterday, this amusing exchange occurred:

@deEscalate: @huma_rashid I am suspicious — you are far too chipper for this late in the semester… Are you really a law student? ;-)

@huma_rashid: @deEscalate You caught me – I just play a law student on Twitter. :-P

@deEscalate: @huma_rashid Clicked the link in your profile; found: “Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here.” I no longer doubt. ;-)
Ha ha! I didn’t think I was ever even remotely chipper about anything ever even remotely related to law school, but I must be faking it pretty well. :-P Or, a much more unlikely possibility, so unlikely that it borders on the obscenely, egregiously, unconscionably improbable….I actually am kind of chipper? I actually am handling this not-terribly?

Ehhh. Doubtful.

However, that mini-conversation did make me stop and think about how I’ve been able to keep my head above water. It’s going to be different for every student, obviously, but hopefully this will help you out as well.

1. I made sure to get around 7 hours of sleep a night, and didn’t feel bad about sleeping in a little on weekends. During college, it was easy to skimp on sleep. My class schedules were a little crazier, so it was easy to stay up really late working on an assignment, go to class for two hours, and then come home and sleep for the rest of the day. Not so in law school, where you’ll need to come up with some sort of schedule if you want to get things done on time. I made sure that I got the sleep I needed every night. Sometimes I downgraded to five hours, but I generally went to bed at a set time no matter what.
2. I did my best not to skip meals – even ate breakfast every morning, a first.I’ve rarely eaten breakfast and I’ve been known to skip meals if I was really busy on a paper, but I made sure to take care of thatafter law school started. Between your classes and your readings and your papers and all of the other demands on your time and SANITY, you’ll be worn down. And you’ll need to eat. If anything, it’s nice to have a routine like that: at a certain time, put things away and go get some food, clear your head, and come back to it. I made sure not to let myself get carried away with everything else at the expense of taking care of myself.
3. I made sure to drop everything and sit down for a couple sessions of “appointment television. If you do nothing but go to class, sleep, and study all the time, you’ll drive yourself crazy in a matter of weeks. Besides, it’s a well known study tip to study for a while and then go do something completely unrelated. For me, that meant closing the books and flopping down on the couch to watch The Office or South Park or 30 Rock or…that’s pretty much all I watch. But it’s a relief to be able to kick back and worry about how socially inept Michael Scott is instead of thinking about how you’re ever going to figure out that dormant Commerce Clause stuff.
4. I made new friends and made sure to hang out with my old, non-law-school friends. Make friends at school. :) You’ll need them. You’ll need other people that are going through the same horrible ordeal and are complaining about the same stuff you are and are trying to learn the same subjects you are. You’ll need them to vent with and study with. But don’t forget your old friends – those jovial, blessed souls that have not ever set foot in a law school. They’re your support system. Don’t think you’re something out of a Simon & Garfunkel song: you’re not a rock or an island and you need your friends. Stay in touch with them. You’ll be very, very glad you did.
5. I kept up with a favorite hobby and even pushed myself to go further. Not-very-well-known-fact: I’ve been writing novels since I was a sophomore in high school. My early stuff was absolutely awful. I treated it as a hobby, as busy-work, as catharsis, whatever I might have needed at the time. As I grew older, I began to treat it more like an actual interest, an aspiration. In college, for my honors thesis, I broke away from my body of critical theory and critical analysis work and did something entirely different, writing a collection of postmodern short stories that I’m in the process of publishing. I’ve kept up with writing since high school, but the difference is that I make time for it now, even when I think I might not be able to. It doesn’t matter if it’s five minutes a day or an hour a day – whatever time I can devote to it, I do. It keeps me sane, it exercises the creative side of my brain that doesn’t really get a work out when writing briefs or outlines, and it’s just fun. But now, I’ve also pushed myself to get something published before the year ends, and I’ve made excellent progress so far in achieving that goal – I’m right on track. And the importance of keeping up with your hobbies and pushing yourself further is that it’s a great pick-me-up. Even if you’re not as confident as you thought you might have been in your law-schooling abilities, you have something else that you can point to and say, that’s mine, I did it, I succeeded. And that morale boost is going to be REALLY important during those three years that you’re in school.

Hopefully, this helped in some small way. Bottom line: do whatever you need to do to stay sane.

That semblance of sanity may one day be mistaken as being chipper.

;-)

Yay.

Edit: I was just told of a sixth tip, via Twitter.

@ronfox: @huma_rashid a 6th tip for 1Ls – ASAP find paying part-time position w/SmallLaw in area you like & do it thru 3 yrs, way to be trained