My (Last) Last Word
04.13.2021
We’re close. Close to finishing another scholastic year, close to being globally healthy, and maybe close to giving ourselves grace for not always being at our best. It’s been a tremendous battle, as the continent shut down, as the economy plummeted, and as the planet collectively went into shock because of the pandemic. For recent or soon-to-be graduates, it’s an incredibly stressful time coming into a difficult job and professional school environment. We’re plagued with constant sense of immediacy, and in a year where our societal institutions ground to a halt, it becomes all-too-easy to feel guilty for not making more progress. I’ve been personally trying, somewhat unsuccessfully, to be able to look at life for the immediate moment––if something brings joy, fulfillment, and a sense of peace in and of itself, it’s worthy of your time and brings value inherently. It feels like an unnatural concept when those things that bring joy and peace don’t directly connect to your longer term aspirations.
I wrote earlier this year that I was applying to law school during the fall months. Now, nearly five months later, I’m still hearing back from law schools. In the law school admissions world, this application cycle was drastically impacted by COVID-19 and its impact on the economy. With a 30% increase in applicants from the previous year, the competition for the limited number of law school seats greatly intensified. It drove nearly all of the top-25 schools in the US to waitlist hundreds of applicants––with some programs, such as U of Michigan Law and Georgetown Law, waitlisting thousands. It’s part of a larger issue of yield protection, basically that law schools do not want to accept too many students that ultimately reject their offer. Normally, a law school waitlist would have a 100~ applicants, now thousands of prospective students remain caught in limbo.
What makes this application cycle all the more difficult is LSAT inflation; when LSAT, law school’s standardized test, was moved virtually, scores increased within all score brackets. This led to law school median LSAT scores increasing across the board; in short, the schools that would have been safety schools for me going into the cycles became reach schools. God only knows what happened to any reach schools that I applied to. It’s unfortunate that this year happened to be the year I was applying in – it’s been incredibly stressful and painful having to reevaluate my aspirations. Even with the acceptances I received, the increase in applicants and LSAT scores makes scholarship money even more difficult to attain––the prospects of signing up for a quarter-million dollars of debt don’t excite me. Broadly speaking, every element of this admissions cycle that could have gone terribly wrong went terribly wrong.
Why do I say all of this? Recently, I’ve been struck by the length of time we have in life. Maybe it’s just a defensive reaction to disappointment and perceived failure, having a mindset where acknowledging that you’ve done poorly in the immediate future but knowing that you can always try again helps. As a member of an intramural basketball team for three consecutive years that has only won a single game, I’m familiar with the adage, “we’ll get ‘em next year.” But if there’s something profound, and hopefully to an extent universal, I’ve taken away from this year, it’s that almost all things that plague our mind with anxiety and stress today mean so much less than the weight we give them. The missed assignment, the late meeting, or the unsuccessful job application all pass; if Shakespeare’s Hamlet is correct, that death is the great equalizer, I’m beginning to think that the passage of time is life’s great neutralizer. And by this, I mean you will return to your normal, or at least your composite normal of however long since your normal began. For better or worse, time passing will not inherently change your larger teleological path. Yet, time will gently guide you back to your normal life progression.
The next few years of my life’s trajectory has experienced a shift backwards. Instead of going directly to law school, I’ll be working at a South Bend Probate Court as a detention officer for their juvenile center. It’s not the immediate prestige of attending a top law school, but it’ll allow this cycle to pass, provide me a year to R&R and retake my LSAT, and reevaluate where and why I really want to attend law school. I’m not a particularly optimistic person, so I won’t say this happened for the best. I’d genuinely be much happier knowing my professional school aspirations were secured; however, I’m convinced that it’s alright to give yourself time. In my closing paragraph, to any people who feel a similar anxiety for their futures, I want to affirm that I’ve probably felt something similar. There’s no guarantee that life will become better, but I want to believe that when our societal normal returns, so will yours. For all of those reading this and wondering how they will be able to make back this year and a half that feels like they’ve lost, I wish you the absolute best of luck regaining your footing.
Daniel Self
selfd@andrews.edu
