-- GabrielleKloppers - 12 Mar 2020

I just wanted to take the opportunity to write a note on something we were talking about in class several weeks ago - about how being in an "environment of risk-averse over-achievers" affects law students as a whole. Having this unprecedented week away from school (I personally am out in the middle of nowhere where not a soul can cough on me), I have thought a lot about distance from the law school environment and how we, as prototypical law students, change within that.

I have realized that although we continually decry the presence of our peers as the influence that makes us unoriginal and uninspiring, our lack of originality does not seem to change once removed from their continual presence. I read a lot of the first essays - which overwhelmingly focused on the law school environment - with a strange distance. As someone who uprooted myself from my home country to the US, I have no traditional support system here. I can't go home to my family during this trying time, as many of us have done. Instead, I clung to my peers (perhaps a bit too much - I did accidentally call Mona "Mum" at one point). So when my classmates said that their interpersonal relationships at law school were making them conform, I looked a bit askance. I understood it intellectually, but I could not connect.

Now that we are mostly apart, the idea that "being in a law school environment" makes us unoriginal because we are surrounded by similarly-minded peers seems to compute even less. Most of us are going about the same routine, save with a little bit of family-time thrown in. We aren't thinking deeply about what we want from our futures, or working on ourselves as people. We're simply seeking to, in the words of a classmate, "Git 'er done." This suggests to me less that we become uncreative from our environs, but rather that this is a natural resting place for many of us. In fact, I found that when I was with my law school classmates, the social drive probably made me more creative - the heady stress environment made us, after all, conjure a lot of fanciful thoughts out of thin air.

I suppose the point of this thread is to ponder on where the drive to the middle comes from: others, or ourselves. Having identified that, how can we work on it? If it is inside us, it won't come from simply leaving law school or the legal profession - after all, we are all spread out, and it seems much the same. Also, I miss all of you and the environment we shared far more than I thought I would.