4L - Ready or Not

It's funny - I look back to the beginnings of this blog (when I started my 1L year) and think about that summer before I started and how I felt:

excited.

intimidated.

ready to go.

In trying to get a feel for what this law school adventure would be like, I read through the blogs of other law students - many of them almost finished with law school and caught a general tone of:

bored.

burned-out.

ready to go.

Now that I am a 4L, I recognize those same sentiments.

Bored - been there, done that. Ready to start another year of learning rules and applying them, and learning when they don't apply. It isn't new and fresh any more. It's just more of the same. The course titles are different, the course numbers are different, the content is different - but there isn't any difference in how we use it. More of the same.

Burned out - again, been there, done that. I'm tempted to say "just hand me the rule book, hand me the cases, tell me what you want me to write about and then get out of my way." I've been a pretty self-directed learner for the most part anyway. I socialized my way through college and graduate school. My learning happened through talking with groups and interacting with others, and the hardest thing about attending an online law school has been the lack of in-person socialization that occurs. There is no student lounge (except for the virtual kind), no cafeteria, no professors with offices and office hours. Email is nice, because you can communicate any time you have a problem or a question, but there is something about being a prof groupie that gets lost in the translation when there is no office to hang out in after class. (I suspect that if Professor Kaufman had an actual Concord office it would have to be the size of a small conference room to accommodate all of us. Same for Professor Bracci.) Same with mentoring. There is no virtual translation for sitting down at a cafeteria table with your bff and knocking your head against the table and wailing "Evidence SUCKS!" (Although Miriam and I came close with Yahoo Messenger - the ALL CAPS key and the exclamation point got quite a workout.)

Ready-to-go: Yep. Definitely ready to start the year. Definitely ready to finish it. Ready to be DONE!

4L - Ready or not - HERE I COME!