Nothing anyone says can really prepare you for the purgatory that is your first year out of college. To borrow a phrase from one of my close friends, there were days during my post-graduation period where looking for positives felt like “fishing for king salmon in a street puddle.” I had moved back to my hometown in Oregon, something I had vowed I would never do. All I’d ever wanted was to leave, and there I was, right back where I had started.

The last few months of my time at the University of Southern California were, in some ways, excruciating. I had spent the first half of my senior year studying for—and losing hair over—the LSAT, applying to law schools, developing stress-induced eczema, looking at my status checkers, and lurking on the law school admissions Reddit page (do not do this). When my results finally started trickling in months later during the spring of my senior year, I became increasingly sick to my stomach with each waitlist I received. Out of the ten schools I applied to in the fall of 2023, I was rejected from one and waitlisted at nine.

I’ve always liked building my life around plans. When I was 14 or so, one of my best friends and I laid out what we considered to be a “perfect life,” which involved getting married at 26, having kids at 28, and making six figures before the age of 30. In the decade since this bold declaration, I’ve let go of these (admittedly lofty) aspirations. One thing I clung to throughout my time in high school and undergrad, though, was graduating college and going directly to law school. I never drafted any kind of plans for time off in between—why bother with a gap year when you know exactly what you want to do? As it turned out, I ended up having no choice but to take an unexpected year off.

Suddenly, my plan that I’d hung on to for so many years was a no-go. I’d always dreaded a life that wasn’t structured around an academic calendar, which splits the year neatly into semesters, with due dates and scheduled breaks for the holidays. An academic calendar always allowed me to plan ahead for a full year of my life.

As I mentioned before, my gap year between college and law school wasn’t exactly a picnic. After a summer of agonizing over Indeed and accidentally paying an exorbitant amount for Linkedin Premium after forgetting to cancel the free trial, I secured a job as a paralegal for a sole practitioner. What followed was a work experience that was equal parts challenging and rewarding. In my experience, working full-time was completely unlike school and stressful in new ways—the stakes were higher, the hours were longer, and I was learning on the job every single day.

For the first time, I took a moment to stop and consider if law school was even what I wanted to do at all. It had always been something penciled into my plans, but actually working in a legal setting made me think critically about what I wanted to do before I subjected myself to the arduous process of applying all over again. 

When I eventually decided to reapply in the fall of 2024, it was a very different experience from my first go-around. This time, I had work experience under my belt, I knew what it was like to work in a legal environment, and I only applied to schools that I genuinely wanted to go to instead of applying where people told me to apply. Moreover, my second application cycle felt like a deliberate choice on my part rather than just going through the motions of what I thought I had to do. When I got my acceptance letter from BC in March of this year, the two years of work preceding it made the moment feel all the better. 

Two months into my first semester as a 1L at BC, I can’t imagine being anywhere else or having taken a different path to get to law school. Even the parts of this experience that we aren’t supposed to love—the late nights studying, the early mornings cramming in a few more pages of reading, long hours at the library—feel incredibly special.

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Sydney Byun is a first-year student and brand new Impact blogger at BC Law. Contact her at byunsy@bc.edu.