It’s all over save for the shouting now, and I’ve been trying to come up with some overarching theme, some great lesson I’ve learned from my first year in law school. But truth be told, I can’t. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve learned a tremendous amount myself, my friends, this whole process, but I can’t distill one single lesson that I think everyone should know about being an evening law student.
I think this is because far more than day students, evening students have a diverse set of experiences outside of law school that affect how the process goes. Someone have no job, so have soft jobs that let them study at their desks, and some have complete soul-crushing jobs that cause you to show up late to your exams. Problems with your spouse or your children don’t go away because you’re in school. Hell, they might get worse. People will still get sick, have babies, loved ones may pass away. In short, life does not stop just because you chose to go to law school.
And maybe that’s the lesson. Maybe the most important piece of advice I can give is that all the talk of the transformative power of law school, of teaching you to “think like a lawyer” doesn’t mean that you have to change who you are. And that is not a bad thing.
