Returning to the blogosphere.

Well, if you used to read my blog, I’m sure you long ago gave up on me ever updating it again. However, I’m going to make my best attempt at resurrecting it. If I get views, then great; if I don’t, then I’ll probably end up stopping again, but blogging my thoughts is time well spent anyway I think. It’s a good time capsule and I’ve enjoyed going back through my blog and reading a number of my posts from the past.

I don’t know exactly where to jump back in, so let me just give an update and then get some reflective thoughts down from the last year and a half that I’ve spent away from blogging.

What I’m up to now

I just finished my 2L year at IU, which puts me a year away from my law degree. In a little over a week, I’ll be starting up my summer job with the Office of the Indiana Attorney General. Hopefully my employer likes me and I like them, and this leads to a long-term thing after graduation. That’s always the hope with your 2L summer job. I kind of fell into this position without expecting to; when on-campus interviews took place in the fall, I sent my resume out to any of them on the list that seemed like an even reasonably good fit for what I wanted. I interviewed with a handful of firms, but it became clear early on that each of those was an extreme longshot. Essentially, each firm was hiring about two people total for the entire summer, putting me up against hundreds of people and giving me almost no hope at all. I eventually began treating them as interview practice, but tired of them and stopped even wanting to go.

The Attorney General’s office was the last OCI that I did, and honestly I forgot about that interview until the morning that it went on. I saw a popup on my Blackberry that let me know that it was happening, at which point I briefly panicked before discovering that my suit was pressed and I could make it. I obviously went in with no prep, and for that matter no anxiety; I was sort of interested in the position, but I’d gotten so used to these OCIs being exercises in futility that I stopped caring too much. However, the tone of this interview was different from the beginning. The interviewer had clearly prepared himself specifically to interview me (unlike the firms, who basically scanned your resume right at the beginning of your interview) and I immediately liked and felt comfortable with him. As he described the job, it sounded like such a good gig that I found myself become increasingly interested. Thankfully I was on my game and gave a good interview, and when offers came out I got one. I’ll be working in their civil litigation department. I’m looking forward to it; law isn’t for everyone, but I think it’s a good match for me, and I enjoyed the work I did last summer for a local circuit court judge.

Thoughts on Indiana

Well, as you probably surmised from my paragraph above, I’m looking to stick around here after graduation as long as I have a job to stick around for…so that’s a pretty good endorsement of my thoughts of the area right away. I like Indiana, and I like the Midwest vibe in general. It’s more of a fit for me than Washington is. I of course love and miss my Washington people, and would be ecstatic if any or all of you moved out this way, but as far as the state itself is concerned…I’m not too determined to move back. I’ll keep coming back to visit of course, and I will stay loyal to my Cougars, Seahawks and Mariners forever, but for the foreseeable future I think that this is where I belong. I love the people. I love that, this being the “Crossroads of America,” I can hop in my car and be in any number of different big cities in four hours or less (Indianapolis, Chicago, St. Louis, Louisville, Nashville to name a few). I love not having to do math when I see that a game is starting at 4:00 EST. Unfortunately I’m pretty trained on that front and I regularly subtract three hours only to realize my mistake and be disappointed that kickoff is still three hours away; that will pass though.

Honestly, Indiana natives will ask me, “Are you nuts? You left Washington to come here?” Maybe in their position I’d say the same. To be clear, it’s not that I think that Indiana is a better state than Washington; I just think that after spending more than 25 years in one state, it was time to branch out and try something else. I can honestly say, though, after two years here, the novelty hasn’t worn off. I genuinely just like living here.

Thoughts on law school

I’m tempted to just call it a means to an end. I like the taste of legal work that I’ve gotten, and while school has largely become a grind, it will lead me where I still believe as firmly as ever that I want to go. But honestly, that’s only my opinion of the school part of law school. Thankfully, even with as much work as we have, there’s a lot more to life than that (outside of the final few weeks of each semester, anyway).

Law school can be downright hellish at times, and that much is etched in my recent memory since this recent finals period was particularly difficult. With that said, to stand back from it and give a fair assessment, I think that the fairest way that I can assess my overall opinion of it is this: as 2L draws to a close, graduation already feels far too close. Yes, there is a lot of hard work. Yes, there is the occasional miserable all-nighter. But, quite frankly, the thought of this whole law school thing ending actually does make me sad. I’ve had a great time here in Bloomington, I’ve made lots of close friends, and it will be hard to say goodbye to many of them when we scatter. Thankfully, if I stay in Indiana, there should still be a decent number of them in my general vicinity, so I won’t be totally starting over socially again, but I love the crew here and am in no hurry to see it disbanded. Time really flies; it’s hard for me to believe that I’ve been here for two years already.

Anyway, those are some general things, but I think that I’ll get into a more detailed recap to catch any interested parties up on my last year and a half. It won’t exactly be the tedious blow-by-blow level of detail that I gave to my recap of my first semester, but I’m sure that I’ve got plenty of stories worth telling. So, I guess I’ll press post on this and at least start up on writing some of that. I hope that I’ve still got a few interested readers out there.

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