I recently suffered a humbling yet not entirely undignified loss in my section’s March Madness challenge. Armed with a few hot takes I sourced from random articles that were among the first ten results on Google, I made what turned out to be a semi-decent bracket for someone with minimal knowledge of college basketball. In fact, for a brief period before my bracket imploded, I was #1 on the leaderboard and had people—baselessly, I might add—trying to claim equity in my picks, arguing that they told me what to choose (they didn’t). 

While everyone starts with the same teams and roughly the same information, each person’s path to the end looks vastly different. Everyone does the best with what they have, and by the end, most people’s March Madness brackets have had some embarrassing fumbles. At risk of making an inelegant comparison, I started thinking about how 1L feels like a year-long March Madness tournament. We all show up with different levels of familiarity with the law and wildly different life experiences, yet somehow end up in the same classrooms, reading the same textbooks, and stressing about the same assignments.

The unpredictability of law school impacts all of us, regardless of whether you’ve known since adolescence that you wanted to be a litigator or you decided sometime last year that law school might be the way to go. At the end of the day, all of us are in Property at 8:30 am, trying to figure out what an easement is and hoping we’re not on call. 

The same way no two brackets will look the same, no two paths to law school will be identical either. Contrary to what you might see on Reddit (seriously, get off Reddit), there is no “right” way to get into law school. In fact, one of the best parts about being a 1L at BC is seeing the wide array of life experiences that have brought all of us to the same place.

Law school is a tremendous balancing act (kind of like those halftime performers who ride unicycles while balancing bowls on their heads), but some of my classmates have even more on their plates than just readings and cold calls. 1L Katherine Helms spent a little over a decade in federal service before coming to law school, and is now juggling the responsibilities of parenthood with those of law school.

Katherine explained, “Balancing 1L and motherhood definitely has had its challenges, but I’m grateful for the opportunity to pursue my JD as a second career student and it’s all worth it. And as a student who is also a parent, I’m very lucky to have an incredibly supportive spouse and faculty here at BC Law to help me succeed.”

As someone who goes home from school and more often than not eats plain slices of bread or makes Kraft mac and cheese with a splash of tap water because I forgot to buy milk, I will never not be in awe of parents like Katherine who go home and have responsibilities far beyond just getting through the assigned pages. 

Law school paths also vary widely when it comes to professional background. Plenty of students have worked and studied in diverse fields, including Stephanie Cha, a 1L who worked as an actor for several years in New York prior to coming to law school. Stephanie’s experiences in the industry ultimately informed her decision to pursue a legal education: “The strikes in 2023 that halted the entertainment industry inspired me to learn more about laws surrounding labor unions and workers, which led me to BC Law.”

In fact, everyone’s pre-law school lives, which we sometimes reminisce about wistfully during particularly long days at the library, have affected the way they approach law school in general. Before coming to BC, 1L Phillip Smitherman played D1 football as an undergraduate at Harvard University and as a master’s student at Howard University. Phil’s football journey taught him the value of self-belief and persistence, and he implores prospective students to “never allow someone to convince you that you can’t do something, no matter your background.” 

Ultimately, the goal isn’t to have a perfect bracket. Okay, the ideal goal is to have a perfect bracket so you can win the prize money and get the clout, but that’s completely unrealistic. Most of us are just trying to get to the next round without completely falling apart. There’s no singular winning strategy to get into law school or succeed once you’re here, so don’t let anyone in real life (or on the Internet) convince you there’s only one way to play this game.

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