I recently received a call from a recruiter with the Marines assessing my interest and eligibility for their law student program. After candidly informing the recruiter that I have never done a single pull-up in my entire life (this was in response to a question; I would not have offered this information unprompted), he asked me how fast I could run three miles. The answer is that I would never voluntarily put myself in a situation that requires running three consecutive miles.

The call ended without me signing on with the Marines, but it did leave me thinking about my capacity for endurance. Admittedly, my physical stamina is nothing to brag about. In an incident that has since become infamous among my hometown friends, I fainted during what was supposed to be a rejuvenating hot yoga session over winter break.

Evidently, physical endurance is not exactly my strong suit. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in law school and in the past half decade of my life, it’s that mental endurance is pivotal. The story doesn’t end when you achieve a goal, change locations, or reach a milestone. Life keeps moving, and you won’t necessarily ever feel fully settled.

When I was 19 and a freshman in college, lamenting the fact that my first year of undergrad was completely remote because of the pandemic, I decided to move to Tacoma, Washington to live with a friend. I sometimes refer to this as my “semester abroad.” In the weeks leading up to the move, I was giddy. Once the scenery changed, surely the way I felt would follow suit.

Over the next five months or so, I realized that I was just as unhappy if not unhappier than before. In an almost comical display of loneliness, I would stay inside the apartment for 72 hours at a time and cry over thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles by myself. I watched so many episodes of Love Island Australia that it felt like I had ripped a hole in the space-time continuum and lost sense of where I was. Obviously, this was nowhere near the perfect happy ending I had envisioned.

Despite this experience, to this day, I still catch myself hoping that the next milestone or major event will be the one that fixes everything. The thought process is always the same: I just need to get through Intermediate Microeconomic Theory, then I’ll be happy again. Once I move to Boston, things will be fine. I just need a job, and then everything will make sense. 

This feeling comes up all the time in law school. For those pursuing big law jobs, there’s a pervasive sense that once you secure your 2L Summer Associate position, you’ll feel miraculously unburdened. I naively hoped this would be the case—and it’s true, I did feel a major sense of relief when I got the call. But then you quickly realize your Law Practice memo is still due, you’re behind on readings, you have yet to submit applications for stipends and scholarships, and there are still dishes in the sink and laundry in the hamper.

Recently, I’ve been trying to view law school and my professional trajectory not as a race to the next milestone, but a test of endurance. We can (and should) celebrate the wins along the way, but expecting one accomplishment to be the end-all be-all will only lead to disappointment when you realize the journey doesn’t conclude there. 

You don’t have to be in the Marines to incorporate endurance into your day-to-day life. Everyone, even those of us who staunchly refuse to run three consecutive miles, can learn to maintain forward momentum towards the next milestone.

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Sydney Byun is a first-year student at BC Law. Contact her at byunsy@bc.edu.