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Finding Balance: How Being A Law Student And Functional Human Don’t Always Have To Be Mutually Exclusive

When you look at 1Ls, it’s no wonder that our profession ends up ranking among the highest for utter dissatisfaction, rampant substance abuse, and crippling depression.

onOctober 17, 2014 at 1:55 PM

Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts from the ATL Career Center’s team of expert contributors. Today, Ariel Salzer offers advice to overwhelmed law students.

When I tell students that I took almost every Saturday off during my first semester of law school and still did well, their incredulity is palpable. It’s not because this is some huge, amazing accomplishment on my part, because it’s not. It’s one day off! I think it’s because, as law students, we are indoctrinated to believe that we need to study all the time. A minute off is a minute wasted. It’s one more opportunity for our classmates to lunge ahead in the great race.

In other grad school programs, doing something like taking a day off each week (gasp!) would not be considered teetering on the brink of insanity. For some reason, though, the minute we get those crisp acceptance letters, buy those books that cost half our rent money, and buckle down to get As at all costs, our common sense tends to go out the window.