It’s becoming tougher and tougher to attend 5 hours of class these days. My seniors told me this would happen to me in fourth year, but I was optimistic that I’d power through it, and show enthusiasm while attending every single class throughout 5 years of law school. I feel like mathematically that is extremely difficult. It’s 60 different papers – and it is quite likely that there will be subjects that people enjoy and subjects that people do not enjoy. That’s true of me as well, because I’m only human.
Powering through the classes I don’t like has been the biggest challenge – largely because sitting in that class, I find it difficult to pay attention, and I also begin to think about the other things I could be doing in that time.
I don’t like this.
I’ve got only 3 weeks left in the semester before exams, but I think I’m going to try to be more proactive in classes in terms of trying to pay attention. And when I fail, I’m not going to think negatively about everything else I could be doing with my time. I want to value each class the way I did in first year again, and while I know reaching the same levels of enthusiasm is unlikely, the least I can do is attempt to get there.
To do this, I feel like the other thing that can help me is background reading. Maybe classes aren’t engaging enough for me anymore, and maybe I’m genuinely not interested in the subjects that we’re studying. That doesn’t mean I need to stop taking effort to try being interested. Reading has always provided a lot of comfort for me – in terms of taking me to a different headspace, and making me feel emotions that the real world sometimes cannot.
I’m going to try pretty hard for the next three weeks. I’ll tell you how it goes.
Tejas Rao 