CM is right; this WSJ story is ridiculous: are law students emotional wrecks? Not about the emotional wrecks part, which I suppose is true enough, but the inference that that this is due to the environment of law school as opposed to the particular characteristics of law students.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but most law students I know (myself included!) would not survive med school, let alone find satisfaction there. Law school may not be easy, but compared to med school, it's a frigging cakewalk. Law students whine more because (1) we are way less tough on average and (2) many of us really don't want to be here.
Maybe some of my vestigial techie chauvinism is going to shine through here, but (1) should be pretty obvious. Most law students were humanities majors in college, and never learned what hard work really is. Law school is a shock to their delicate systems. Meanwhile, the pre-meds were crazy for ages. Actual medical school is still a step up in work, but they've been working hard for years, and they're ready for it.
(2) may not be such common knowledge, but it certainly should be to blog readers. A lot of people kind of drift into law school because they aren't sure what to do with themselves and they're kinda smart and do well on the LSAT. These people don't really want to practice law, and the strong focus on actually learning legal doctrine in law school, while it shouldn't really have been surprising, makes them understandably unhappy. Nobody has any illusions about how an MD is a "versatile degree" that "opens all kinds of doors," so practically everybody at med school actually wants to be a doctor. They've probably wanted it for a really long time, because you'd kind of have to in order to put up with all that pre-med craziness alluded to above. Now it may be so awful (you don't see me doing it!) that along the way some of them decide they don't want to be doctors after all, but I'd bet dollars to donuts that's still a smaller percentage than the number who never wanted to be lawyers when they got here.
I could go on too, about why we should expect med school to be objectively harder than law, but I have to go to work.
2 comments:
Heh. I like how we blame people unlike ourselves for being law school psychos. You blame weakling humanities majors, I like to blame grade-inflated Brown grads and people who didn't work after college and came to law school out of inertia. Whee!
But really, I'm certain social science majors were more common, and I don't think it's the major that controls, I think it's the personalities. I think you have a bunch of nervous strivers who learn the upper norms of studying, get in study groups with others of the same species, start doing it, and work themselves and everyone else up. You and I both know a crushing workload isn't really required here. It's self-imposed.
But I think #2 is the majority of it, plus the lack of much practical consequence to anything you learn in school unless you seek it out.
yes everything you say is true. i was an english major in college, and yet i managed not to finish reading a single dickens book yet still get the gpa to go to hls. it's just not right.
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