Blahs, Blurbs, and Blogging

So now that we have been formally introduced let me talk a little bit more about this whole "Blog my three years in law school" concept I have going on. First off, I should note that I am not the first, nor will I be the best to ever do this. In fact a large impotence for me to create this project can be credited to the work of a gentleman by the name of Anthony Rickey and his wonderfully interesting blog Three Years of Hell to Become the Devil.

The first task I set about accomplishing before sending my application packets, was gathering as much information as I could about particular law schools on my list. So of course I read the whole top law school rankings website from top to bottom, and I also considered some of the information from the US World and News, but ultimately I was unsatisfied with the information they provided. Somehow all of the stats and figures felt too cold, too clinical, too sterile. Even the small blurbs about life at the schools felt incomplete. What I needed was the voice of a student, I needed to know not only what made the school great, but what were the tough parts as well; the little things that only a student of the school would know.


With this in mind I went hunting for the voice of my people; tech savvy, highly intelligent, articulate, and exhibitionist young adults. I just knew it would take five minutes with Google and I would have more stories, opinions, and commentaries then I would know what to do with. I expected to sift through countless blogs, jornals, and social networking sights trying to pick out gems of wisdom...what I found was a barren waste land of commentary. To say that I was shocked by the results of my query for "Law student Blog" would be a criminal understatement. Not only did I find there to be very few leads, but the ones that existed all seemed to be dated by several semesters and years. I had assumed that in this Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter age that most college kids live in; it would be easy to pick the brains and adventures of many a law student. This was not to be so.


The biggest help was the aforementioned blog TYOH to Become a Junior Devil. I found the author to be witty, engaging, and thought provoking. It helped that Columbia had been on my list of schools to apply to (Full Disclosure: They waved my application fee and invited me up for a tour. At the time of this posting I have yet to get a final decision). He seemed to do a great job of dispelling common myths about Columbia and law school, as well as providing a new prism to view the load that would soon come with being a member of the law community. He also provided lots of good information about what he felt were some of the best ways to maintain a current, engaging, and relevant blog. As you can see I have listened and incorporated some of those tips he left in my own creation.

You should know however that this is no mere knock off of an original product, instead you should conceptualize my blog as a creation of my own curosity, need for a memoir, and sense of a niche market. Of course I did reverse engineer his blog and decided for myself what I felt to be strengths to incorporate and weaknesses to avoid. I mean, must we have to reinvent to wheel everytime we wish to create a new car? So consider this an evolution of anything that has come before. This is not my first forary into the blogosphere after all. Starting in my senior year of high school and running continously up untill several months after my graduation from college, I kept an online blog which can be found here.

I often joke that my xanga was the longest running commitement I had ever had in my life. I shared most of my young adult life in those pages: triumphs, tribulations, loves, losses, and everything else that can be imagined. My former blog was a place for me to pour my soul and heart. This will not be the same, 3YUD represents not so much a break, as a continuation of that story. It is a new page, a new book even, yet it is still set in the same fantastic world which I seem to inhabit. While my xanga was filled with the day to day happenings of a young man transitiong from the security of home and childhood into adulthood; this represents a more confident and secure man who is sharing with his peers thoughts, comments, and critiques of the world around him. No longer is there the questions of "If I can, Should I, or What happens if"; 3 years under Depaul of Law is a running commentary on the life I will be living, not the life I wish I had.

Verbal Ambassador