Welcome To The Spring Semester Of Your 1L Year, Make Sure To Keep Your Cool

“Baby boy, you only funky as your last cut / You focus on the past, your ass’ll be a ‘has-what’ / That’s one to live by or either that’s one to die to / I try to just throw it at you, determine your own adventure.” — Andre 3000, OutKast

The winter break is over. You made it to your second semester of law school. How do you feel? Did your grades reflect your effort? Or, like so many, is your law school still torturing you with the Sword of Damocles?

Whether you have received your grades already or will receive them next week, for better or worse, last semester’s marks will not bleed into this term. But the habits you have formed may. If your results were poor, don’t let one semester’s loss turn into a second loss. If you did well, don’t expect to skate on your past efforts. In the words of Winston Churchill, “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

The beginning of the year is a natural time to take inventory of your life. Is there room for self-improvement? Is something hindering you from reaching your goals? Are you hoping to cure bad habits? These type of questions often motivate us to make those infamous New Year’s resolutions.

After speaking with a few of my mentees, I have to believe this 1L class is facing more competition than the past several 1L classes, as my colleague Staci Zaretsky highlighted in her recent articles:  “First-Year Enrollment Is Way, Way Up At Some Law Schools” and “Law School Enrollment Is Up For The First Time In Nearly A Decade.”

Needless to say, there will be a lot of students clamoring for those rare 1L summer opportunities. This same cohort of students will face the crowded 2L summer associate market, and then the 3L entry-level shitshow. This being said, the 2009-2011 law school graduate classes would’ve killed to compete in this current job market. Even T-14 graduates struggled during the Great Recession. Despite what some had believed prior to the last downturn, our industry is far from recession-proof.

The good news is that the job market for law school grads is “the best since the recession.” The bad news is that this isn’t guaranteed to last until the time you graduate. All this to say — you should only focus on what you can control. You have no control over the economy or what the job market will look like when you graduate. But you do have control over your effort, energy, and attitude this semester.

Law school is a trying time for the majority of students. If you are in search of some wise words, let me leave you with one of my favorite poems by Rudyard Kipling:

IF
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

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Renwei Chung is the Diversity Columnist at Above the Law. You can contact Renwei by email at projectrenwei@gmail.com, follow him on Twitter (@renweichung), or connect with him on LinkedIn. 

Welcome To The Spring Semester Of Your 1L Year, Make Sure To Keep Your Cool curated from Above the Law