What, Like It’s Hard? | Opening Arguments

During my sophomore year of high school in my AP Government class, my teacher proposed a question to me and my classmates that ultimately changed the trajectory of my life. 

Before that moment, I wanted to be an engineer. I loved and was really good at math, and my science courses were by far my favorite part of each school day. I loved learning about and talking about space. I planned my entire identity around wanting to be an astrophysicist and answering life’s biggest mysteries like “what’s on the other side of a black hole?” or “how can we travel at light speeds?” I thought my life’s destiny was laid in a path of gold and was certain one day I was going to end up at NASA or something of the sort.

But despite being a math nerd who boasted the STEM ego for years, my parents instilled in me the values of kindness and philanthropy that I just couldn’t shake. In all my daydreaming about my future career as a scientist and engineer, every thought I had routed back to the same old question — “how can I help people?”

In AP Government on that fateful day, my teacher played a debate on the smart screen between a conservative police officer and a Democratic pundit arguing whether or not racial profiling existed. For context, we watched this debate mere days after another tragic murder at the hands of a police officer for just this exact thing. After the video ended, my teacher turned to the class and asked us to debate whether or not systemic racism existed.

I went to a rural school where racism, homophobia and other forms of bigotry were common and normalized. But this brazen question, asked so boldly by a teacher, had completely blown me away. As my white classmates debated and ultimately decided that systemic racism does in fact not exist, one of my peers wrapped the whole indescribable conversation up by raising his hand and saying “I actually think white people are the most oppressed.” He supported his abhorrent take, talking about how he didn’t make our school’s basketball team but one of the few Black students in our year did.

I walked out of the classroom that day vowing to never be as ignorant or repulsive as many of my classmates demonstrated themselves to be. I began watching the news and reading political science papers for fun, debating my bigoted classmates and getting involved in social issues. The next year, when I found out I was miserably terrible at AP Physics and logical reasoning is essentially just really complicated math problems, I decided I was giving up on my engineering dreams and was going to go to law school instead.

And that’s the story of how I got here — three years deep into an undergraduate degree and currently preparing my applications for law school where every class, every extracurricular and every internship has been completed with one thought in mind — how will this help me get into law school?

The pre-law world is scary and competitive. I will fully admit that I was not immune from playing the nasty pre-law games of one-upmanship and lying. I have been isolated and isolating. I have side-eyed and taken advantage, judged and offended. Over the last couple of years, I have completely lost sight of what’s important for the prospect of getting into my dream law school.

I have never, in my 21 years of life, been involved in a process that is this competitive, this inaccessible and this classist. Gathering information on what to do and how to be successful is the most difficult thing in the world when your peers will not give you straight answers and the Internet is full of people ready and willing to tell you that you are not good enough. And when confronted with the cost of it all, it feels like the entire world is telling you that it’s impossible to reach your goals. 

I am tired of being the person who stands in the way and gatekeeps what information and advice I do have. I am tired of supporting people who are like that and I am tired of fortifying animosity and unfriendly competition in the pre-law environment on campus. I don’t think I was the biggest villain by any means, but my complicity is bad enough.

That is why I wanted to start “What, Like It’s Hard?” this year. I want this to be a space where I am unnervingly open and honest about everything that has to do with the law school application process and encourage my peers to do the same. For those interested in applying to law school, I want this to be a place where you can find out how to actually do it and how it actually works. 

Applying to law school is hard. Very few people get through the process with ease. But if we encourage each other and work together, we can all get through this without the added pressure of competition and petty pre-law games. I am certainly not the perfect law school applicant — far from it — but I believe that this can be a space to learn and grow with each other. And hopefully, as we learn the ins and outs of law school applications together, a few of you might become more open and honest. Being pre-law and wanting to go to law school doesn’t have to be isolating if we don’t let it be.