Back in the saddle

It’s been a long hiatus—possibly unforgivably long in blogosphere terms. The cause of the hiatus was threefold:

(1) Work. While April always seems, from the perspective of some other month, as if it’s going to be a relatively easy one in Admissions (all decisions are largely made; all financial aid awards are largely made; our admitted student weekends are completed), it never is. Everyone whom we have admitted seems to have lots of questions during the month prior to our April 30 deposit deadline—a fact that seems predictable enough, and I have no good explanation for why I never in fact predict it. But when the reality of oodles of immediate work crashes headlong into the things I scheduled from the fantasy-world of some other month, the result is no blogging. April, however, is now over.

(2) Personal Life. For the last three and a half weeks, I have been completely personally derailed by a cat. You laugh. You scoff. You roll your eyes. But it is the truth. As of this morning, that situation has now been resolved.1

(3) Anxiety-Based Procrastination. What is the all-too-common reaction to not doing what one is supposed to have done? Denial and avoidance. This is not productive. I have successfully quashed that cycle.

Now, on to substance. About a month ago, one of our 3Ls, who works as a peer advisor for Michigan undergrads considering law school, asked me my opinion on a question he gets a lot: “What post-college job would be an impressive bullet point on a law school application?” As it happens, my answer was in complete accord with his advice. Don’t you love being able to sincerely agree with people? Such a pleasant thing. Anyway, here’s how he put it: “y advice is usually to tell them to do whatever they want, unless what they want to do is play video games on their parents’ couch. I’m doing this basically under the theory that a lot of these kids are taking a year . . . off because they’re burned out, and that working 60 hours a week as a paralegal just because they think working at a farmer’s market doesn’t seem serious enough for a law school application isn’t the best move.” He went on to explain that the woman he had been talking to most recently “had a pretty impressive consistent history in environmental science working for various groups, and I think she just wants to move out somewhere warm and work on trails or do something in The Nature, as my Eastern European friends like to refer to it. But she’s talked to a few law students who have essentially told her that she should take a paralegal or ‘legal assistant’ job instead of doing that, because her application will suffer if she’s not doing Real Work. And I told her that was silly – I figure, students should feel free to take the year off and do whatever they want. Obviously if they have an opportunity to go to Sudan on a Fulbright, they probably shouldn’t take a job at Blimpy Burger and live at their old fraternity instead, but that within the range of experiences you can have with only 8-9 months of free time, doing whatever you think is going to make you happy is the best thing to do.”2

Now, I should add two caveats. The first is, the advice changes once we’re talking about jobs that last longer than a year or two; at some point, you’re investing a largeish chunk of your life in some endeavor, and it’s reasonable for both you and an Admissions Office to expect that you’re getting something identifiable out of the experience—some return on the investment.

The second caveat is one I shared with my e-correspondent: “I do think it’s good to have a sense of what you’re getting into when you embark upon being a lawyer. There are many ways to get that sense, however, and a paralegal job is certainly not a sine qua non to having the requisite knowledge. But if someone is thinking, ‘I kinda think I’d like to be a lawyer, but I’m really not sure what lawyers do,’ then that person might be well-served to get some answers to that question, and paralegaling is one way to do so. But that’s about the applicant’s well-being, not about the applicant getting into law school.” And then I added: “I’d also say that there are certainly many paralegal jobs in this world that are fun, and that add to one’s knowledge base, and that aren’t 60 hours of work per week. I worked for a sole practitioner, for example, and I learned a ton and he’s still the best boss I’ve ever had.3 But I took the job precisely because I wanted to decide whether I really wanted to go to law school, not because I wanted the job to get me into law school. It served the function I wanted it to serve.”

I am happy to report that he wholeheartedly agreed with my caveat, just as I had agreed with his advice, and thus we both got to enjoy that pleasant feeling of affirmation. And for all prospectives who are considering a year, say, cleaning out cages at a cat shelter? You should feel affirmed too.

-Dean Z. Assistant Dean and Director of Admissions

1 Perhaps a more thorough explanation is in order. Also, it’s been four months since I put a footnote in my blog, and I feel the need. So: after months of lobbying, my children persuaded me we should get a third cat. Up until this point in my life, all my cats have come to me by happenstance—wandering up to my door, or being deposited on my metaphorical doorstep by some acquaintance who knows I am a soft touch. But after I agreed to another cat, none serendipitously appeared, so we headed out to a shelter. We found a year-old female who, after three apparently happy days confined to a small room, took her first moment in the larger environment of the full basement to climb up into a teensy crawl space between the wall and the ceiling. Where she stayed. For three and a half weeks. Yes, I had my very own ceiling cat. Now, she would come out at night and eat and drink, but still, the situation was a little upsetting. It’s hard to feel like you’ve made a cat’s life better, moving her from a no-kill shelter to a crawlspace. Plus, it felt like a lot of rejection. The happy ending came this morning, with her first daytime appearance; after about 90 minutes of cajoling, I succeeded in getting hold of her. I can’t tell you how triumphant I feel about the whole thing. And I feel reasonably confident that the welts will go down pretty soon. For those of you who have now concluded I am a lunatic, let me just say that in my experience with cat people, I am at most middle-of-the-road in my lunacy.

2 Once I get started with the footnoting, it’s so hard to stop! In case anyone is worried that I am plagiarizing by cutting and pasting his well-expressed email rather than writing my own prose, I got his permission. He said, “As Dick Posner said in his handy book on the subject, ‘concealment is at the heart of plagiarism.’ Which I think means that if the 7th Circuit started hearing plagiarism cases that you’d be home free after having written me this email.”

3Sorry, Evan. But he used to take everyone in the office out to lunch almost every week—and he bought dessert. And he increased my salary 150% in the three years I worked for him. And his wife gave me her gently worn, very expensive shoes. And he brought me multiple pitchers of sangria on my birthday. It’s hard to compete with all that.