“Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom.
Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.” – Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

It was the night before my first final as a 1L, and I was starting to feel overwhelmed. I knew, in a sort of intangible way, that an entire semester’s worth of work would come down to one test. And I could not help but be aware of the fact that this would prove stressful; everyone I knew who went to law school told me as much, as did most of my current peers. I suppose it’s also self-evident when you see the syllabus and read the words “your entire course grade will rest on the final examination” that you will have to perform on the day or pay the price.

Yet, maybe from a place of self-preservation, I did not fully appreciate this reality until the day before the exam. Self-rationalizing that I always had more time to prepare and that the final was still (x number) of days or weeks or months away was no longer an option. The exam had arrived on my doorstep, and there was no avoiding it. As much as I thought I would be immune to these feelings because I was older or had more experience or had a better perspective, or whatever other glib reassurances I had given myself, it turns out that when the rubber met the road, the nerves hit me like everyone else. The feeling that I would somehow prove inadequate if I didn’t perform on this one test lingered in the back of my brain like a rattlesnake waiting for its moment to strike. 

I think it’s impossible to avoid these feelings within the pressurized and inherently competitive world of 1L and the law school curve. Equally, it is important to acknowledge them without veering into hyperbole; there are far worse things in the world than doing poorly on an exam. But, having said that, I could not, at least, compartmentalize exams as “just another test” in an environment where I was constantly reminded of the importance of grades in the job hunt and the latent idea, whether expressed or not, that every law student seems to have that grades define our abilities as compared to our classmates. 

In law school, everything becomes comparative, whether you want it to or not. I know people who claim they focused only on their classwork, their job hunt, and their extracurriculars, without worrying about what other people were doing, and maybe that’s true, but I’m dubious. Not that I think they’re lying, but I just think it’s impossible to live that way in the environment law school foists upon you. Even if you do not care what others are up to, you’d have to be hermitical to avoid the LinkedIn updates, the chatting before and after class, the discussion in the library and the cafeteria, the constant chatter about the curve, Law Review, professors, and so on. I could not remove myself from it, as hard as I tried. 

I went to class every day with the same people and listened as they shared their views on the law, and many, many other topics throughout the semester. I could not help but want to stack myself up against them, while equally fearing the idea that I was inadequate by comparison. For me, 1L proved difficult in ways I did not foresee. As a first-generation law student, with no lawyers in my family, I often felt ignorant of things other people seemed to know innately: how Law Review works, anything about any law firms, what practice area I wanted to pursue, how exams work, law school competitions, the curve and on and on; I was ignorant to all of it. 

Socially, I thought of myself as a man without a country. There are not a lot of places where I could feel comfortable in my skin at a top-25 law school in Boston. It’s just a different environment than any I had experienced before, and a ten-year age gap with most of your classmates is not always the easiest to navigate. No one wants to be the old man at the club. Beyond that, struggles with my family at home made the experience even more difficult for many reasons, a major one being that my parents were skeptical about my decision to return to law school. So, I put all the more pressure on myself to succeed in the classroom to prove to them that I made the right choice, and to remind myself that I did not come back to school to find a new social circle. 

Which brings me back to the night before the exam. All the latent pressures of law school came to a head for me, compounded by some strange social aspects of my own 1L experience. As I lay in bed that night, counting down the hours until I’d have to wake up, my mind started to wander into what would happen if I bombed the test. Would I have to drop out? Would I be able to show my face around my classmates again? Would my parents continue to question my choice? Would my friends and loved ones respect me less? 

I’ll speak for myself—but I think it applies more broadly—in saying that part of the reason I came to law school was because I was a successful student. Part of my identity came from that success, and I know that’s true for many of my classmates who were more accomplished students than me (in some cases, by a long shot). It’s not so easy to just remove that part of yourself, no matter how often the school told me the grades didn’t define me. In some inescapable ways, they do and they will. I couldn’t deny that as I stared at the dark ceiling and wondered what I would think of myself if I didn’t perform to my expectations. 

Then I thought of it differently, and it’s something that I come back to often as I continue to navigate law school and my future career. I love nature, and for everyone, it’ll be something different to appreciate, but that’s where I found my center. As my mind raced through all the doomsday scenarios, I slowed my brain down by thinking of a few things.

Will the stars be as beautiful tomorrow night as they are tonight, even if I don’t get a single answer correct? Yes.

Will the mountains stand as stoically and majestically as they do right now? Will they still take my breath away? Will they still make me feel incredibly powerful and insignificant, even if I don’t get a single answer correct tomorrow? Yes.

Will I still get a chance to discover and experience the beauty of this world, even if I am a subpar law school exam taker? Yes. 

It sounds simple, but it worked for me. It helped put things into perspective, in a way that I needed to remove myself from the pressure cooker of 1L. There’s an adage that comparison is the thief of joy, and that is true. For me, the way to dodge that thief came by reminding myself that the natural world is immutable and awe-inspiring, and that will never change as a result of an exam, a job placement, or anything else associated with law school. It made the stakes feel lower and reminded me that the world will spin on, no matter how I did the following day. 

I leaned on that lesson for the rest of my 1L experience, and it helped me when things got especially tough. To say that my experience is going to be representative of anyone else’s experience is presumptive, but I think many people will relate to the idea that law school is tough, everything that comes with it is tougher, and if you have things going on at home outside of it, there are times where it can feel like too much to handle. I leaned on the support of the university and my loved ones to navigate my road, and I suggest anyone who is dealing with this to do that as well.

But at the end of the day, this experience is singular, and I had to discover my own ways of coping with the pressure. For me, that came through self-reminders that I am not so important in this world. That no matter what, I could find beauty in the world that would always be available to me, even if the worst scenario played out. Comparison may be the thief of joy, but sometimes, in the right circumstances, comparison can be the provider of perspective. If there’s one thing you can not afford to lose in law school, it’s that.

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Ian Hurley is a second-year student at BC Law. Contact him at hurleyia@bc.edu.