| | |
|
AmithavReddyFirstEssay 3 - 20 Apr 2025 - Main.EbenMoglen
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstEssay" |
|---|
| |
<
< | It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted. | | | Challenging Conformity | | | In today’s business atmosphere, diversity of thought and background are integral to success. I hoped to leveraged my childhood experiences and understanding of many of the world’s cultures to help generate inventive ideas at law school and legal career; additionally, I was excited to meet new individuals after joining Columbia Law School who share my appetite for knowledge, but who have their own unique past to develop my perspective of the world. | |
<
< | However, my time at law school has unveiled to me how the structure of law school and legal is not conducive to one expressing their true thoughts or personality. Rather, a system of conforming to meet a professor’s ideologies or mold into a cookie-cutter version of the ideal job applicant is what every law school student is incentivized to do. Traditional law school mechanisms such as cold calls prevent real, inspired class participation as students simply answer standard questions about cases in the reading, but are unable to interact with the material in a novel manner. The typical discourse in a law school classroom involves a professor lecturing without any free-flowing discussion or engagement from students about their views on the course material. | >
> | However, my time at law school has unveiled to me how the structure of law school and legal is not conducive to one expressing their true thoughts or personality. Rather, a system of conforming to meet a professor’s ideologies or mold into a cookie-cutter version of the ideal job applicant is what every law school student is incentivized to do.
Who says?
Traditional law school mechanisms such as cold calls prevent real, inspired class participation as students simply answer standard questions about cases in the reading, but are unable to interact with the material in a novel manner.
Have you tried?
The typical discourse in a law school classroom involves a professor lecturing without any free-flowing discussion or engagement from students about their views on the course material. | | | Furthermore, the grading system in law schools where all of the focus is predicated on the performance on a singular final exam prevents students from truly engaging with course material either. Students solely concentrate on the topics that will be testable on the final rather than wishing to delve deeper into a specific subject that piqued their curiosity. During the course of my next two years at Columbia, I aim to take advantage of the flexibility in course selection to interact with areas of the law I am unfamiliar with currently. By doing this, I hope to avoid falling victim to the conformist culture in law school and being forced to suppress my personality to match those around me. | | | In this moment, I am grateful for all the experiences that have shaped me into the person that I am today and wish to ensure they shape the lawyer I become. | |
>
> |
I think the way to make this essay stronger is by getting away from the "I am an original but law school doesn't want me to be" narrative. There's no actual writing about lawyering here, no sign of what it might mean for you to commit yourself to some form of justice-seeking or client-serving, or any actual interaction with the ideas one runs across in law school, which is rather in tension with the supposed subject. Why not cut back on the personal-statement summary of achievements and write instead about the life in the law you are thinking about leading, and how a law school that worked for you might go about helping you to achieve it?
| | |
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. |
|
|
|
|
This site is powered by the TWiki collaboration platform.
All material on this collaboration platform is the property of the contributing authors.
All material marked as authored by Eben Moglen is available under the license terms CC-BY-SA version 4.
|
|
| | |