Many of us may know one or some law students aspiring to enter the legal profession after a good few years of academic hustle or probably some of you have plans of entering law school themselves. Definitely, stories have been circulated of how intense the course may get or how horrifying professors can be from the very moment they stepped foot inside the classrooms. Those who have been there would sometimes jokingly tell that it is where they would find misery served on their plates on a daily basis. It seems exaggerated but it is the reality faced by every lawyer-to-be. To give us a hint of the life inside it, here are some of the odd things only a law student would get:
- Nothing is ever enough. From the time one law student needs, to the quantity of striking highlighters one must have, and to the amount of coffee they should get inside their system—nothing can ever match the enormous pile of readings every aspiring lawyer must read overnight. Yes, all must be done in between every normal person’s concept of dusk until dawn.
- There’s death, not just as fatal as it should be. There’s this fictional death you get every time your name is called on a case you never read.
- You can never be ready. You thought you were but never in your whole life have you been this unsure. Uncertainty is what keeps every professor’s game quite a deadly shock. You covered all but nothing can make you well-prepared for that shotgun recitation of questions as diverse as this universe—literally, queries no ordinary man had the chance to contemplate upon.
- The greatest academic warfare. Every single day is a battle of a student pit against their professors’ years of experience in their respective fields. One’s emotional threshold is tested, intellectual boundaries are measured, and physical capabilities are considered; all to win a seemingly impossible war.
- Holidays can never amount to rest days. These are their buffer days—time to catch up with all the backlogs every law student had been harboring in their bags since the semester had opened. I know life has an allowance for cruelty; law school doesn’t. It is a year-long intellectual torture.
- Social suicide. To get through every semester, each law student knows that it entails quite a good number of sacrifices; family gatherings, love-making, social events, and you may even have to miss your actual birthday celebration intentionally—and these are just to name a few.
- Prayers as saving grace. When all else are doomed to fail, take a moment to pray and ask for the salvation of your grades. Prayers work miracles, and miracles are what you’ll need after a bad recit—bad exam turnout combo.
- Nemo dat quod non habet. As this latin maxim would go, “you can never give what you do not have.” In the same light, you can never answer a question that you really do not know the answer to. No amount of highfalutin runaround can satisfy a professor’s unending legalese tirade.
- Constant whining. You spend half a day’s worth constantly complaining about literally everything law school is offering.
- On-deck anxiety. Nothing feels great than knowing that you are not on-deck the magical list of students ought to be grilled for recitations. On the contrary, if you are on-deck, happiness seems so distant for a day. Emphasis supplied.
Nonetheless, all pain leads to glory. The insurmountable stress would soon find its rest—an intangible ticket to every law students’ passage to this noble profession. And as commonly termed, the ultimate driving mantra would always be: “delayed gratification.”
This article is originally published by Martin here
