Can you IMAGINE?

Really? Law?
I, too, can hardly believe it.

If you had asked me four years ago, or even two years ago, I never would've answered "law school." No, up until a year and a half ago I was planning to study painting in graduate school. Useless degrees be damned!

Then I started to look at my past, which led me to thinking about my future. My list of jobs since graduating college with a BFA in painting and drawing include:

• office temp
• college bookstore temp (Colorado State University)
  
• Home Depot customer service associate
• art and frame store cashier and custom framing designer
• college bookstore temp (Northeastern University)
• college bookstore temp/cashier (MIT Coop)
• support staff at the MIT Libraries

In six years I've worked at over half a dozen jobs and none of them paid me enough to maintain a decent savings account. Only the library job was at times intellectually challenging. At only one of them did I spend more than a year (my library job--three and a half years and counting).

So then I started to think about my future and deducted that with an M.F.A. in painting I would be setting myself up for more of the same. I started thinking about preparing for a career, which, I suppose, was a big step toward growing up.

I studied for the LSAT (do it; buy a book and spend at least a couple of months preparing for the test. You DO NOT want to have to take it again). I took the LSAT; I passed the LSAT; I applied to some schools; I was accepted; I won two full-tuition scholarships; I paid my deposit to Suffolk University; I registered for classes.

Now here I am, preparing to buy my books and pose for my ID photo. I have a class schedule and student health insurance (oh, beautiful liberal Massachusetts, your health insurance reform makes my heart go all pitter-pattery).

I'm excited and scared and thrilled and petrified. I have a sense that law school is going to be harder than I can even imagine (see my previous post) but I'm looking forward to the adventure. I just wish some compassionate law student out there would tell me what it's really going to be like.
Anyone?