“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” — Maya Angelou

Gaining control of your class schedule is one of the most exciting aspects of leaving 1L behind and moving forward in your law school journey. Aside from the anxiety it induces as everyone gathers around tables in the yellow room or library to sign up for classes at the exact time that the registration window opens, the chance to pick all your courses is one of the most fun parts of law school. But not enough people take full advantage of this freedom. I understand the temptation to use your future career path as a guide for course selection. Yet more students should utilize their time in school to explore various areas of the law. Studying at Boston College Law School means we have access to some of the sharpest and most thoughtful legal minds across a wide variety of subjects. Take advantage of that bounty of intellectual acumen while you can. Doing so will make us all better lawyers and students, and, more importantly, more well-rounded people, regardless of our future professional track.

I love sports and exercise. One thing that’s true in both realms is that overspecialization stunts progress and can prevent one from reaching one’s full potential. An emerging area of concern in the sports world is the over-specialization of children in youth sports. It has become increasingly rare for people to play three sports through high school. Various studies have emerged in recent years that demonstrate that this practice can have negative physical and mental health outcomes, including early burnout (sound familiar?). With exercise, it’s a cornerstone training principle that changing up your exercise routine helps prevent performance plateaus and injury, and that variety in routine leads to long-term mortality benefits. For example, even the most devout weightlifter should still hit the treadmill, and the most dedicated distance runner should pull some weight here and there.

Similar dangers can also come about when we overspecialize in our law school path. This is something I see often. Every time I speak with other students, they tell me about how they’ve geared their entire schedule around what they think they will be doing as lawyers after graduation. The future transactional attorneys exclusively schedule corporate law and finance classes. Conversely, the aspiring litigators pile into classes on the other side of the legal spectrum. Don’t get me wrong, I understand the desire to gear your schedule around the things that interest you. And of course, people want to learn more about the areas of law they will encounter in their professional careers. But variety, as they say, is the spice of life, and so much is also true for law school.

Taking a class outside your comfort zone is both exciting and fulfilling in ways you may not expect. It can force you to think about problems in different and inventive ways to help hone your problem-solving skills. Taking on new and different academic challenges helps build mental agility, a key trait for any future lawyer. More than that, if you have not had the chance to work in different fields or experience different areas of the law before law school, this might be your chance to uncover a new area of law or the professional world that interests you and shapes your future. During my short time in law school, I have heard many stories from professors and current legal professionals about how taking one random class or sitting in on a lecture about an unfamiliar subject changed the trajectory of their entire career. You never know what hook will interest you until you experience it, and by needlessly restricting your opportunities, you might be hampering your own career unnecessarily.

Beyond that, the legal field has a disproportionately high amount of burnout among practitioners. Burnout has numerous interrelated causes, and it’s dangerous to attribute any single source as the primary reason why many legal professionals struggle with this issue. I believe overspecializing in our field is one potential source of future burnout. As law students, we should do what we can to mitigate the danger that burnout poses. One way to do that is by taking that interesting sounding seminar class, especially if it has nothing to do with your career, or take that transactional class, even if you “know” that you will spend your future days writing briefs and arguing before the court, or take federal courts or advanced legal research, even if you “know” your future is in private equity or mergers and acquisitions. You will have 30 or 40 years to do that work every day. Why rush into it now? When the chance presents itself to do something just because it might be interesting or different, take it.

Of course, I understand that not everyone will agree with this, and many people in law school have focused their academic and career paths on a particular endgame. Sometimes the most rewarding things come from the least expected sources. As someone who left academia for a professional career, I gained a new appreciation for what a unique opportunity it is to focus on learning and self-improvement. In the working world, everything you do centers on productivity and achieving a particular endgame, and self-improvement exists only as a potential side benefit. School presents us with the chance to work on ourselves, expand our thinking, and interact with professors who only want to share their knowledge with us. It is much harder to come across that in the working world, for understandable reasons. 

So let’s take advantage of this time. Let’s try that new thing, that oddball class, or that interesting clinic or externship. You never know if you will get the chance to explore yourself and the world in that way again.

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