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FearAndAnxiety 16 - 04 Feb 2010 - Main.DevinMcDougall
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| | When Eben talks about the fear and anxiety created by law school, grades, and dwindling firm jobs, does this resonate with you? How about fear that you won't find something that you are passionate about, that fulfills you, and that allows you to support yourself and your family?
I wished that Eben had spoken more to that fear and anxiety today in class, and more specifically, what to do about it. | | |
-- DevinMcDougall - 04 Feb 2010 | |
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Ok, so I just made the page: CLSEducationReform
-- DevinMcDougall - 04 Feb 2010 | | | |
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FearAndAnxiety 15 - 04 Feb 2010 - Main.CarolineFerrisWhite
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| | When Eben talks about the fear and anxiety created by law school, grades, and dwindling firm jobs, does this resonate with you? How about fear that you won't find something that you are passionate about, that fulfills you, and that allows you to support yourself and your family?
I wished that Eben had spoken more to that fear and anxiety today in class, and more specifically, what to do about it. | | | -- MarenHulden 03 Feb 2010 | |
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> | Maren, you make a compelling case for maintaining perspective on this whole experience. I have taken a lot of time "off" (if you consider working full time "off"), both during my undergraduate years and before coming to law school, and expected that the experience I gained would hold me in good stead once in law school. It has, for the most part, but I am struck by how law school has revealed the chinks in my armor. | | | | |
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> | It's hard to keep perspective in the dizzying spectacle of Times Square, but Ron, have you ever known anyone personally who worked in one of those firms? It seems sexy from the sidewalk, looking up, but the view from the inside is something else entirely. When you're working all the time - and I mean all the time, 7 days a week, 12 or more hours a day - you don't have much time to flash your fancy self about the town. I agree with your formulation of the success big firms are selling, except for the part about "enjoy life."
It helps me to think about law school as a trade school, and I agree with the sentiments many have expressed about the real world application of what we're studying. It's exciting. It's exciting to contemplate being a lawyer, and I suppose that no matter how fearful or anxious we feel at times, lawyers we shall be.
I should probably edit this post and digest the comments and such, but I'm not quite sure how to go about that, so I'm holding off for now. | | | |
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FearAndAnxiety 14 - 04 Feb 2010 - Main.DevinMcDougall
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| | When Eben talks about the fear and anxiety created by law school, grades, and dwindling firm jobs, does this resonate with you? How about fear that you won't find something that you are passionate about, that fulfills you, and that allows you to support yourself and your family?
I wished that Eben had spoken more to that fear and anxiety today in class, and more specifically, what to do about it. | | |
-- CarolineFerrisWhite - 04 Feb 2010 | |
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Very interesting discussion. There a few points I have some thoughts about.
+ Anxiety: What kind?
I think it's important to distinguish between different types. As Erica points out, there is a kind of anxiety that is inherent to the human experience. There is also the kind of anxiety that comes with dedication to doing an important job well. But there's another kind of excessive, unhealthy anxiety, and I think that's the kind that law school often induces.
Hans Selye, a McGill? psychologist (my alma mater! also - go Canada!), who did research on stress, distinguished between eustress, which is a type of stress conducive to grow, and distress, which is destructive.
I think that the traditional law school experience tends to go overboard into distress, beyond the normal quota associated with human life or striving for excellence.
+ Grades and Education Reform
I think part of the cause of this surplus anxiety is the requirement for curved grading based on a single high-stakes exam (tangentially I happened to have two closed book exams first semester - even worse in my opinion). Not only does this grading system not measure much of anything, I think it creates distortions in the substance of what we learn and how we learn it.
That's why I think the proper framing of the issue is not grade reform, but education reform. Evaluation systems can't be cabined off from the rest of an education system, because the evaluation system affects the other parts of the system. It's not just grades that are stake - it's really about education more broadly.
Taking a cue from Felix Cohen, we can consider that a thing is what it does. What the current system does is turn out large numbers of graduates who tend to work for large firms. The grading system as it is apparently serves that purpose well enough. As mentioned above, it helps firms sift through large numbers of applicants with minimal effort. Incidentally, curved grading based on a single exam also making teaching a lot less demanding for those professors so inclined.
But is this really the best way to educate lawyers? As Eben points out on his page about grades, lawyers used to be trained through apprenticeships, which offered mentoring and individual feedback. University-based legal education was supposed to produce a better outcome.
One thing that I have found frustrating is that it is difficult to find an entry-level job in public interest environmental law, my area of interest, without several years of experience. I wonder why, after three years of legal education, graduates are still considered unprepared for entry-level attorney positions. Part of this may be a matter of the job market - perhaps it is not that a new graduate would not be capable, but rather that competition for positions of this sort is such that groups can raise their hiring standards.
However, I can't help but wonder if a differently structured law school experience might produce graduates able to practice law at higher levels of effectiveness. Less “transcendental nonsense,” more individualized feedback from faculty and more emphasis on faculty teaching skills, not just research, might be a way to get more value out of the three years.
Education reform is a fight we all have a dog in, and I am very interested in thoughts about how we get there. In particular, I would be interested to know more about how and why Yale Law made their changes. Tangentially, I think moving to a High Pass – Pass – Low Pass – Fail system is just a cosmetic change. I mean, the traditional system is already predicated on sorting large numbers of students into four categories, so this is really just relabeling boxes. I don’t think that constitutes genuine reform. It might also be interesting to make a wiki page for the history of education reform efforts at CLS. Eben has mentioned some stuff about in class, and some info is also mentioned in a post above.
-- DevinMcDougall - 04 Feb 2010 | | | |
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FearAndAnxiety 13 - 04 Feb 2010 - Main.CarolineFerrisWhite
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| | When Eben talks about the fear and anxiety created by law school, grades, and dwindling firm jobs, does this resonate with you? How about fear that you won't find something that you are passionate about, that fulfills you, and that allows you to support yourself and your family?
I wished that Eben had spoken more to that fear and anxiety today in class, and more specifically, what to do about it. | | | I'm not sure where this leaves us ... none of this probably lessens anyone else here's anxiety  | |
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> | -- MarenHulden 03 Feb 2010
-- CarolineFerrisWhite - 04 Feb 2010 | | | |
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FearAndAnxiety 12 - 04 Feb 2010 - Main.DevinMcDougall
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| | When Eben talks about the fear and anxiety created by law school, grades, and dwindling firm jobs, does this resonate with you? How about fear that you won't find something that you are passionate about, that fulfills you, and that allows you to support yourself and your family?
I wished that Eben had spoken more to that fear and anxiety today in class, and more specifically, what to do about it. | | | It would be an interesting question to survey Northwestern students, the majority of which (think was 90% or so) have at least one, most at least 2 years, of work experience. However, I do not think the answers do not differ till you are asking people who actually had a career. This may explain some of the different attitudes you see among members of the Older and Wiser Law Students (OWLS) than among the younger set. Part of this probably stems from the fact that those who took time off don't really have significant real world experience since such work is colored by the expectation that we will be going into graduate school shortly. I think a lot of the fear is not getting a job, but not getting the "right" job, which we are frankly not sure what the right answer is. What doubles the fear is the feeling that our whole future depends on one year of work, half of which is based on the very beginnings of law school when we haven't had time to learn the language.
-- DavidGarfinkel - 03 Feb 2010 | |
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< | | | | I also wonder whether the fear and anxiety for some people is related to stepping beyond the standard amount of schooling into territory where you no longer can do what everyone else does, or what you're supposed to do. I remember (and I've seen this in many of my friends in their first one-two years out of college) feeling lots of anxiety the first 12 months out of college ... what am I going to do with my life? how do I do that? how can I find something to do that both helps others and meets my interests? Fretting over those questions for about six months (and I was fortunate enough to spend those six months in a remote mountain village without modern communication or pressures, but with beautiful wilderness scenery) helped me get used to wondering about those questions. Now, even though I wonder about those things a lot, the wondering causes me little anxiety.
(note: this first 12-months out anxiety was quite noticeable in Teach For America too--people straight from college often had more difficulty adjusting to new sets of values in their schools/communities--but it's not nearly as poignant as in law school, probably because in TFA you know EXACTLY what you want in your work, and at least have a good idea of how to get it) | | | **I feel so lucky to be here--for many reasons: I get to spend my day reading/thinking about interesting ideas and questions, I don't have to wake up early every day and spend the first hour wishing I were back in bed, I don't have to work 18 hours a day, and I have access to incredible minds, fantastic career opportunities (with promise of a life of reasonable comfort) and an amazing city that my students in Rio Grande City couldn't have dreamed of.
I'm not sure where this leaves us ... none of this probably lessens anyone else here's anxiety | |
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