When I first visited HLS, I remember being shocked at how pretty the view of the Charles River was during the T-ride to campus. I was a late admit, so my first visit came in the middle of August. The sunlight bounced off the water, the boats dotted the area around the harbor, and all the while the Boston skyline filled the background.
I recalled this image recently as I made the T-ride back to campus for January term (J-term). The river was frozen over and the sky was filled with snowflakes. I am not making the comparison to complain about the weather (I went to school in Rhode Island, so I knew what I was getting myself in to). However, the contrast did make it abundantly clear just how much time has passed since I first came to law school.
My first day back in Cambridge for J-term was the Sunday before classes. I had no real intention of going to campus, but I needed to print something in the library. When I first started walking around campus, I couldn’t really put my finger on it, but something felt strange. The more I thought about it, I realized my problem was that a piece of me is surprised to be back on campus at all. The first semester had been so mythologized that I had never really conceived of a world in which something came after first semester. My goals had been to survive the classes, get what I could out of them, and try really hard to not fall behind. Now that I have (hopefully) been successful in those goals, I am not sure if I have the energy to do it again five more times.
My contracts professor in her last lecture referred to our classes as “gold coins.” As she put it, we only have one chance in all of our lives to pick and choose classes from the greatest legal minds in the world. We get to choose 20-something classes and when we’re done, we’re done. No do-overs. As I think about the coming semester, I think about the classes that I am excited to be taking (the standouts include an international law course on constitutions in different countries and an elective on housing policy). My professor was probably right. Instead of worrying about how I’m going to be dealing with the workload for five more semesters, I should spend time looking over the course offerings and professor profiles and figuring out how to spend my remaining gold coins.
– Anit
