After quite a journey in the academe with graces galore and a distressing job-hopping adventure in the corporate world, I entered law school with half-baked idealism and some neat doses of practicality, not to further mention the innate cynicism running in my veins. Like all lawyer wannabe’s, I took the simple philosophy that I’m entering law school with nothing to lose and everything to gain. After about three years in law school, much has changed, not in my lifestyle but in my views about many things and life in general. My half-baked idealism has receded to rawness. My twangs of practicality have found solace in sheer cynicism.
While it is mainly really an academic playground in there, the tests are far tormenting in the spirits than they are in the brains. It really is a strife. More than the academic test of pen and paper, it is one of plain wits, of patience and endurance. It is a test of character. The bouts of insanity should be normal though. When you’ve loads and loads of pages to chase, you’d nonchalantly mistake blue from green. When you’ve grueling sessions to partake in, you’d easily find refuge in the silliest and corniest jokes on earth.
The grueling exams which are essay-types are downright stressful to begin with. The utter subjectivity does take its toll too. Countless times you’d be left in awe receiving your exam booklets. Just when you are all confident about your answers, sometimes they are never good enough for your professors or the examiners. Then I started wishing for Multiple Choice exams then. But that sure would make the exams double, triple harder than they already are.
The daily torture of recitations are sure main events. The jitters you get are just like the ones you get before a Pacman fight, or even worse. I would have my way of recounting the nerve-wracking experiences but I would rather dwell on the hundreds and thousands of bloopers and comedic acts me and my batchmates have unmindly shared. The silly answers you spill out because of helplessness and dire humiliation, nothing would really compare with those. The pressures of having an honorable judge or a respectable lawyer throwing seemingly endless questions on your frail body, is really no joke at all. So thus they say, law school has no room for the soft-hearted.
The culture has quite some share of the system too. I’ve come around some fellows or transferees who recounted how they thought they have been unjustly kicked out of their former schools. They talk about teachers hating them for reasons in the wrong side of the spectrum or what they’d fondly refer to as politically-motivated ones. So if your father, mother, brother, sister, aunt or uncle, or any close relative is in bad blood with say your teacher, you’ d probably know just what to expect. You might just want to anticipate quite a reception for that or the teacher’s pet surely will steal off the spotlight from you. Yes, law school is not spared from the shunning favoritism syndrome. I’ve seen professors being outrightly nice and pleasant to some students for reasons you’d not bother ask about.
There are also organizations, fraternities and sororities who’d welcome you with open arms and imbibe you with some neat lofty ideals. They sometimes are a huge help socially especially when you’re a newbie around. They can be your sources of notes and materials too. But whether they can be a lot of help, that really depends on you and how you can take advantage of whatever resources they can impart.
Barely graduating from this field, I have yet to learn more as to how unpredictable law school is. And while I’m left desperately trying to spare my common sense and conscience from this tormenting environment, I should indeed keep crossing my fingers for answers and all the more clamor for justice.
The thing is, when you have the right attitude and the right amount of discipline in your system, great are the chances you’d breeze through law school. Then again, there’s too many factors and one of them is chance.
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