Judgment for the Plaintiff in the Amount of One Career

See previous post if you are confused about place and person names.

On the train to Edinburgh (pronounce it ed-in-brrrrrrra; roll the ‘r’).

My husband (who needs a name in this drama-tragedy, so from now on he will be called The Economist) and I are going to spend a few days in Scotland on the Isle of Skye. We have gone to Scotland every summer since we have lived in Britain (except the first, but that’s a story for another time); we absolutely love it—if I could live anywhere in the world I would live in the northern Highlands. The landscape is so beautiful, rugged and spectacular as to make you doubt your eyes. In the summer the sun stays out until 11:30 at night. It is not overly warm and you have to have clear weather to really get the full enjoyment of it, but we have always been lucky in that respect. Plus, when we come to Scotland, it is always to go walking (or hiking as we might say in the US) and the cooler weather is ideally suited for strenuous outdoor activity. We are also very fond of Edinburgh (whence came many illustrious personages including Adam Smith and J.K. Rowling). It is out of the way, calm and relaxed, unlike London, yet still very cosmopolitan.

This year, we are taking the train to Edinburgh and renting a car to drive to Skye. Our route will take us through the extraordinary region of Glen Coe, along the western coast and across to the western isles. We rented a cottage on Skye and we’ll use that as a base for walking trips during the days, augmented with time for reading and relaxation. In addition, probably a good amount of time will be spent in the local pubs watching World Cup action.

I love a long train trip dearly and I will miss these times when we’re back in the US.

Still, there are other reasons to look forward to it. Now that I have been accepted to law school, I have gone from Total Failure to ambitious go-getter overnight. I return home in semi-triumph.

I do recognise that my life is about to change in significant ways. (For one, I have to stop using British spellings for everything.) I am moving back to the town where I grew up and where I went to college. I have deeply missed it in the times when England was kicking my butt. I wanted nothing more than to get into law school at The University of Pomorum and immerse myself in law study without the distractions of a big city. Now that it has happened, I’ve discovered the truth in the adage ‘Be careful what you wish for’.

There are so many good things about this situation. I’m going to a well-regarded, 1^st tier law school, paying in-state tuition. I will be living at my in-law’s house (they will not be living there during this time) so I will not be paying rent, not to mention that it is a really nice house. I will have a dishwasher (live in Britain for 4 years and you will be left in no doubt of how much a dishwasher adds to your quality of life). The combination of in-state tuition and not paying rent will mean that I will graduate with much less debt than most people and will therefore have more options when I graduate. Not to mention the amelioration of the burden of repaying the loans. I will, as I said, be able to immerse myself in the study of law without the distractions of big city life. This includes the fact that I will no longer have an outrageous commute to get anywhere—one of the prime benefits of small-town life. I will have a car (or at least access to one) which means greater independence, always a good thing. This being my hometown, I will have no learning curves when it comes to orientation. I know exactly where to go, where to shop, where to get books, where to get coffee, where to go to the gym, what traffic is like at various times of the day, and any number of other tidbits about living in a town with which my intimacy was forged in infancy. I will also know that access to the law school is hopeless on football Saturdays. I believe that my comfort with the town itself will help me get my feet under me when it comes to studying.

I used to work in the research laboratory of a very famous professor who had repeatedly been given offers from the most prestigious institutions in the country to move his lab there, but he chose to remain in my home state for more than 20 years now because he felt the other places were located in cities which would prove too distracting to his employees. I think there is a lot of sense in that notion (although his employees seemed to get up to a lot of mischief anyway). I hope that in the quiet and the calm tranquility of my hometown, I will be able to focus myself fully on school, achieving perhaps a state of one-ness with the law, absorbing the law, and otherwise learning to love the law with all my meek little heart!

Since this is my hometown and I plan to live here for a while I will also be able to work on the dreaded networking. The fact that you can be helped in your career just because of the people you know is completely distasteful and repellant to me, but apparently, as I am constantly told, it’s the way the world works. So who am I to fight it? (Secretly I’m going to destroy the system from within.)

One more thing: going home means that I can finally use all the wonderful gifts I got from my wedding four years ago which have been sitting in my in-law’s storage room, collecting dust and running out their warranties. My husband and I are the types of people who really enjoy things—not expensive things, not things that demonstrate wealth or status, but things that have sentimental value: that remind us of great trips we’ve taken or that make us think of the friends who gave them to us. Sometimes, like when we are home for Christmas, I like to just go visit my wedding things in the basement, thinking of the day when I will finally be able to use them and start making my own home. That day is coming soon!

Another benefit in my new life is that it will truly feel like life, or at least the next step, rather than a holding pattern, which is how England has felt for the last 2 years. Being a law student makes me feel like an adult—because only serious adults go the law school, right? Right?

You see, I have a 15 year plan which I will elucidate at another time. If I didn’t get into law school this year, it would have thrown my whole plan off. Disaster averted!

So you see, this situation is almost ideal and I know it is exactly what I need to do, what I should do; it is nearly the best possible outcome that was within the realm of possibility for me. But in my state of depression and longing for home, I did not give much thought to some of the downsides.

Unfortunately this does mean that I will not be living in the same place as The Economist.However, we realized some time ago that this was inevitable, considering that we only overlapped in applications on two schools, and neither of us got into either one. A lot of people have advised us that career-oriented couples often have to spend some time apart from each other, especially during grad school. We always viewed it as a last resort, and unfortunately it has come to just that. The good news is that we are only 2 hours’ drive apart which is not bad, considering that the other available option was for The Economist to stay in London and for me to be in the Midwest. We prefer this. We will both have a car and will alternate driving on the weekends. If we’re lucky one or both of us will avoid classes Friday or Monday. It is the best we can do. The Economist has applied to take a 1-bedroom apartment in Cowville, where he is doing his PhD. I am really delighted that I will have a roommate, my husband’s cousin, who is doing her MBA. She is a lovely girl I have always gotten along with and it will be nice to have a roommate.

Another negative to which I had not given much thought is the fact that my home state of Pomorum gets damn cold in the winter. Having lived in the highly temperate Britain for four winters, I’m scared I have become a real wimp about the cold. It troubles me because I am a Midwestern girl with cold, ice, snow, rain, tornadoes, humidity, thunderstorms and heat in my bones and I’m worried I’ve gone soft. I always love the bracing cold and the snow when I go home for Christmas, but I’ve only had it in small doses for the last four years. What will it be like to have months of it on end? Now that I’ll be living in a house, will I be expected to shovel snow?!!? This horrifies me, I always hated shoveling snow.

Plus, I’ve always found British winters to be much worse than Pomorum winters. In the UK, it never gets below freezing, so although it’s cold you never get snow. It’s just cold rain.Consequently, everything feels cold and clammy and wet rather than bone-chilling but dry. Plus, in the UK, you can go weeks without seeing a single ray of sunshine. Between the grey of the sky and the grey of the wet concrete, it can be pretty depressing. In Pomorum you get clear skies even in the winter with a layer of snow that reflects light all around and is, frankly, beautiful. I am counting on those sunny days to sustain me in the long cold winter months.

Another semi-con/semi-pro is the fact that we will be closer to our families. I put this in the overall con column because I am feeling wary about this at the moment. We love our families of course but we have really enjoyed our total freedom and independence these last few years. I am someone who particularly prizes liberty and independence, having seen too little of them as a child, and I am concerned what being so near family will do to my sanity.

Finally, I mentioned before that there isn’t much to distract in my hometown. Neither is there much to entertain. I will truly miss the big city arts of London: world-class museums, theatre, music, dance, etc. In my hometown, there isn’t much to do beyond going to the mall, seeing movies, going drinking and going bowling. It is a good study environment but not very exciting.Yet, I seriously doubt this will be a problem as my life will be consumed with school and little else.

So do the pros outweigh the cons in this situation?

Overall my judgment is for the plaintiff. The Isle of Skye notwithstanding, I cannot wait to begin my new life as a University of Pomorum law student.

Resurgam

I am sitting in the Shaw Library at the London School of Economics. It’s one of those old-fashioned grand libraries: a wood paneled room, topped with a glass dome, its walls lined with portraits of former university presidents. Various bookshelves are ranged against the walls, heaving with dusty books, their spines yellowed and tilting behind milky glass. Red upholstered armchairs are clustered around the room. The library is only sparsely populated, most students having finished their exams and decamped, setting up in pubs to relax, drink and watch World Cup. The ones that remain in the library study or write feverishly; some are on Facebook; some are asleep.

I have not experienced the hush rustling quiet of a student library since I finished my master’s degree. I have spent the last two years planning on re-entering academia this fall to begin a law degree. I could just as well have said, ‘to begin my life’. The last four years, since I moved to England, have felt like a long and fruitless detour to the one thing I have wanted to do since I was a junior in college: go to law school and become a lawyer. I bear the most blame for this. The first year, while my husband was in graduate school, I spent temping. It was a job of mindless number crunching and paper pushing. The second year I did my master’s degree. I thought it would help me get into law school. The third I spent doing an internship that, in practical terms, finished four months before I left it. I thought it also would help me get into law school. The eight months since the end of my internship have constituted a long and punishing period of unsuccessful job hunting. I put this down to the recession and consequentially the scarcity of job openings in my field, combined with my lack of substantial work experience. I am classically over-educated and under-experienced. I have been very frustrated and discouraged by this situation but I have taken comfort in the thought that I would enter law school in the fall after which I would have gained some qualities of employability. I was very sanguine about it... until the rejections began pouring in.

In the meantime, my husband was accepted to a PhD program with full funding, a teaching position and a stipend. We planned to move back to the US, something I was so very excited about, until I realized that I was not returning to do anything. I only faced more of the same situation as London: endless fruitless job hunting—only this time it would be more difficult because we would be moving to a much smaller city with fewer job opportunities in my field. A few weeks ago I began submitting applications to various jobs in New York and Washington D.C., where I thought I might have more success. It would require my husband and I to live a substantial distance apart from each other—at least 2 hours by plane—but my husband understands that I can’t spend another year doing nothing of value for my career. Law school? It seems impossible. I have an offer from University College London but feel I don’t want to live in London anymore, much less with my husband halfway across the world. I have been rejected or waitlisted at every US school to which I applied. I have never felt so hopeless and so helpless about my future. I have contemplated giving up on law altogether. I have tried to accept (once again) reduced expectations for my future. I have even contemplated getting pregnant and resigning myself to a life of stay-at-home motherhood simply because I am clearly not smart enough to have a career.

It was around this time that my wonderful (though sometimes meddling) mother-in-law mentioned my situation to some lawyer friends of hers who also happen to work on the Law Faculty of my first choice Midwest Law School. One of them suggested I call him. I was not happy about having to discuss my failure with a member of the profession I wanted to enter but talking to him raised my spirits a bit. He gave me very useful advice about people in my Home State to contact who might know of job opportunities there. He also suggested that likely the reason I did not get into law school this year was because it was simply a particularly difficult year. Many more people applied and would likely accept admission because of the recession and this made it very challenging for more mediocre (my word, not his) candidates like myself. He also said that it was possible I could still be accepted because, at this time of year, a lot of candidates are sifting their various offers, declining or accepting offers, which may open up places for people to be taken off waitlists. Consequently, if candidates who are accepted to one school are offered a position at a better school, this opens up more places, which gives everyone still waiting a bit more of a chance. After talking to him I was more optimistic but still generally skeptical that anything would change.

Only two weeks later I got an email asking me if I was still interested in entering Midwest State School to study law and what was the likelihood that I would accept if given an offer. I said: 1.) Hell yeah I was still interested and 2.) The likelihood that I would accept was 100 f**king per cent. That was last Friday.

This Monday, I got the email that I had been accepted to study law at my first choice, Midwest Law School. So as it turns out, I’m going to be a lawyer after all!

Bits and Pieces

Hey ya'll I just wanted to say thanks for the comments by DA and by Alistair, I appreciate your support on my disappointment about Oxbridge. I still have a second shot but not too hopeful. Anyway, no need to dwell!

DA, to answer your other question. Was I ever serious about applying to King's College London, University College London or the London School of Economics? In truth, no, I wasn't interested when I first applied, but it was a matter of dragging and clicking boxes on a screen, so I did it. I also thought I was testing the waters as a precursor for Oxbridge admissions, but in fact the Oxbridge admissions period is almost over and I have heard next to nothing in the meantime from the other three. They have each confirmed receipt of my application and I have responded to their various requests for transcripts (by the way, transcripts are expensive!). Now that the Oxbridge admissions period is over, and I'm also doing my American applications, I'm beginning to get really nervous that I won't get into my preferred American law school at my Midwest State School alma mater. The application numbers have been massive this year and--looking at the calendar--I am submitting my applications much later than I should have done. These nerves make the potential of getting into the other three British schools much more important to me, as I don't want to delay law school another year. It's a sensitive and difficult thing, the admissions process.

DA, I'm glad to hear you've got through the UCAS and the LNAT. How did the LNAT go?

Anyway, speaking of my Midwest State School. I have had a strangely fateful and luck-driven life so far. I don't believe in fate or luck in my rational mind, but I cannot deny my life has been filled with some strange coincidences and connections, not all of them necessarily good. This requires a bit of background. When I was a child, my family and I did not live in my Midwest State but were driving through it when we were in a car accident in which my father died. As a result of this accident the rest of my family moved to this Midwest State permanently. I then grew up and went to school in this state. I met my husband in high school in this state. My husband brought me to Britain where I refined and clarified my career goals, to be a lawyer.

Now, going back to my Midwest State School's college of law. It has become my first choice, until I hear finally from Cambridge. I began to really worry that I would not qualify as a resident to get in-state tuition anymore, which would change my view of things considerably. As I read the university policy online, I didn't completely understand it so I called the registrar's office to run the situation by them. I grew up in my Midwest State and did my undergrad there, as a resident. However for the last 5 years I have been living out of the state--would I still be considered a resident for tuition purposes? The lady had the strangest attitude about it. She said the only important criteria were:

Did I graduate from a high school in this Midwest State? Yes. And do I have one parent living or buried in the state? At first I panicked because my mom moved out of the state a few years ago. Then I remembered, wait, my father is indeed buried in the state. So, yeah, I guess as a result of this totally random, accidental car accident I get in-state tuition at this Midwest State School.

Okay, now I've totally creeped everyone out. It's cool, people, but like I said my life has been filled with weird, serendipitous coincidences and connections. Honestly, I tentatively hope they don't stop now.

Okay, now I'm just getting annoyed!

So I got my rejection from Oxford a few days ago and was somewhat ambivalent about it. I guess I just didn't know what to feel. On one hand I was disappointed because I thought I actually had a good shot at getting in. On the other hand I was not terribly surprised because I had also been telling myself that it was a long-shot. It's funny how the psyche protects itself like that.

Yesterday I received a rejection from Cambridge. The Husband and I drank a bottle of wine between us and I spent about 24 hours in a psychological tailspin, thinking about 'plan B--what to do when I don't get in to law school'. There is literally nothing else I would want to do.

I am still working on my applications for US law schools, and I'm feeling quite nervous about it because I had thought I would be a better candidate for British law schools than American ones--turns out I'm not a great candidate for British law schools either. I meant to apply much earlier but... [insert generic excuse here]. For that 24 hour period they seemed to be my only hope.

Just now I got an email from a different college at Cambridge asking if I wanted to interview with them. This is part of the Winter Pool. After the first round of interviews, which I attended, the rejects get 'pooled' and other colleges can invite them for interview. So I'm being called back to interview for another college.

Considering that I have been on an emotional roller coaster, this latest development is just plain annoying! They dangle an Oxbridge education in front of you by inviting you for an interview and rubbing their awesomeness in your face, then reject you, telling you you're not good enough. Then they bait you again--well I'm not falling for it! I'm not getting excited about this interview since it will most likely come to nothing. (See my psyche's wheels grinding? Self-preservation comes first.)

Anyhoo, that's the news. I've said it before but I think it might actually be coming true: this blog has become a record of my mediocrity.

Back

Alas, dear readers, I have been stressed out and busy. LSAT study, job applications, law school applications. Okay, I've also been on holiday. I'm not too terribly concerned about neglecting you because as far as I know, 'you' and 'readers' include only my Husband.