Ack! I’m going to law school!

I got my acceptance letter last night from Georgetown Law. Now I have 9 months to figure out how I’m going to pay for it!

I got my acceptance letter last night from Georgetown Law. Now I have 9 months to figure out how I’m going to pay for it!

15 thoughts on “Ack! I’m going to law school!”

  1. Ben!!

    Congrats, man!

    Its no easy road, but your clarity of arguments (of which I have often been devestatingly on the other side) makes me think you’ll dovery well.

    I’ve been where you are, going into Nursing school 3 years ago – and I knew NOTHING about science. As I finish up this week, and face the nursing boards in 4 weeks, I can honestly say its been worth it.

    Hope you give a similar report in 3 years.

      1. YAHOO!

        Excellent. So you’ve got your life cut out for you for the next several years. Reach for the stars.

        While all of you guys have some great email addresses I’m not all that creative with such things, but here’s the one that will apply for a long time:

        dirtpoorcollegestudent@law.georgetown.edu—

        Christy

  3. You guys are awesome

    Lots of good email names to choose from — I’ll be sure to let you know which one wins!

    — Ben Schuman Mad, Mad Tenor

    1. Creativity is never encouraged here at GULC

      If only we did have a choice in our email tags.

      As a 3L here, congratulations. It’s been an amazing two and a half years here and I wouldn’t have traded it for any other school.

  4. Ben, I did a google search

    Ben,

    I did a google search on Georgetown law school and your blog came up. Looks like you should be in school now. I work on international development for a DC based democratic assistance NGO and am thinking about going to law school. If you ever need a quick break from heavy law study, I’d like to meet up with you to hear about your experience going to Georgetown law school. 🙂

    Orien

  5. How am I going to pay for it

    With your soul, that’s how. If you finish highly ranked, you will become a highly paid wage slave at a nefarious city firm. That is if you fit their profile and have no egregiously human personality traits such as a sense of humor. If you don’t place high in the final rankings, you can still share in the joy that these firms provide by becoming a legal Kelly Girl. You will enjoy 70+ hours per week in the malodorous company of the hundreds of other losers doing document review.

    If you are a kiss-up, kick-down sort of person, you will be humiliated because you will be lower on the totem pole that the cleaning crew. You will learn a lot about labor and employment law by watching these firms circumnavigate them. You will learn to keep your head down and to look over your back at all times. Remember the sneaky little s—s who cut the pages out of research books in the law library? You will meet again.

    There will be diversions, however. Man hating and racial taunting will ad a note of excitement to your day. If you are a good, insidious climber, you may have your talents noticed by a chief paralegal who will want you as an underling. Then you will have someone to kick down: the temps from whose ranks you evolved. Who knows, your firm may even allow you to be referred to a staff attorney. Chances of that are slim, though. Most will not allow you such a grand title and will not allow you to use Esquire after your name.

    In short, you will learn much about human behavior and possibly in this nest of vituperators, you will make a few friendships among your equally abused mates. Your sense of specialness will leave you before long and all you will be left with is debt-driven desperation that will keep you in this mess. You will always be at the call of such flesh traders as Legal Source and Special Counsel and you may find yourself spending a lot of your crumb earnings on drink instead of debt service. There will periods of rest. You may work long hours for months, six and seven days each week then find that something you said gives you an unexpected and lengthy vacation.

    The good news: you may be able to impress the folks back home by telling them that you are a DC attorney. That will make it all worthwhile. Good luck.

    Oh, if you think that this doesn’t happen to Hoyas, you are mistaken. All the Ivies are represented in this happy bunch of on-call desperadoes as well as numerous former Associate Attorneys.

    EDIT by matthew: Punctuation, grammar, spelling, paragraph breaks, foul language, etc. modified.

    1. Matt, Matt, Matt

      Hey “Ben There”: What do you call 10,000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea?

      A good start! 😉

      Seriously, “Ben There”, I think you shouldn’t hold back on your feelings. You need to learn to let them out. Tell us how you really feel!

      Matt, Why did you clean this up? I think the point would have been made much more forcefully had we been able to read the raw post (except for the foul language, that has to go, I understand).

      I’m not saying the poster’s point would have been better broadcast, but I would have had a better idea about the poster. By cleaning it up, you make it look like they may have been a lawyer at one time. Or at least passed an English class.

      And anyways, nothing says bitter vitriol better than poorly punctuated misspelled rantings! God bless the internet! 🙂

      My $.02 Weed

      1. Clean up

        Why did you clean this up? I think the point would have been made much more forcefully had we been able to read the raw post…

        Errors were more along the lines of using “vituperants” rather than “vituperators”, common spelling and hyphenation errors, and wall-of-text problems.

        I had a similar problem with not using an extra carriage return between paragraphs for readability for years before someone finally called me on it. So I gave him the benefit of the doubt. The original form of it was very similar to what you see above.

        I thought it was a sufficiently bitter, pessimistic post to perfectly suit the mood I was in anyway, so I made it pretty 🙂

        Regardless, the fact that I had to make numerous corrections gives an insight into why this particular person did not succeed in a profession where the two principal skills are the ability to research, and the ability to write coherently based upon your research. Courtroom argumentation is perhaps a dim third.

        —
        Matthew P. Barnson

        1. More than a dim third

          Based on my experience, and unless someone in the profession can point to the contrary, a small fraction of the legal action universe actually goes to a courtroom.

          1. Depends

            If you’re a criminal lawyer, you’re probably in court a lot more often.

            Most of us, however, will spend much more time in the law library (or in settlement negotiations in a conference room) than in the courtroom.

            The current average is that only 5% of all civil suits end up in court.

            — Ben

    2. Hee hee

      This is pretty damn funny.

      Sorry buddy, I’m not adept enough at self-loathing to agree with you here.

      As a matter of fact, I am highly ranked and have done very well. I had my pick of offers from some of the most prestigious law firms in the country. I don’t mind working hard, particularly for a salary that can only be described as “obscene”. An easy commute, interesting work, good people – sounds good to me.

      You may not realize that not all lawyers hate their lives.

      — Ben

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