On the first day of Orientation, my classmates’ confidence deepened my self-doubt. They seemed older, more experienced, and sure of their place, while I was still questioning mine. At 21, I had graduated from a state university in three years and gone straight to law school, but instead of feeling proud, I couldn’t shake the fear that my peers had more to offer than I did. The day I got into BC Law, I couldn’t wait to arrive; now that I was here, I wondered whether I had what it took to succeed.
At Orientation, the admissions presentation showed that our class’s age range began at 21, confirming I was one of the youngest students there. But the other end of that range caught my attention. Someone in the incoming class was 51, had thirty years of life experience on me, and we were about to begin the same journey. Did those years bring advantages or challenges of their own? More than anything, I wondered whether my new classmate felt the same self-doubt I did.
That curiosity led me to Lieutenant Colonel Keith Helms, United States Army (Retired), and to a conversation that showed me law school is not about age or experience alone, but about recognizing what we each have to offer, even when we struggle to see it in ourselves.
Keith joined the Army at 17, planning to serve four years to help pay for college. That plan eventually became a 27-year military career. Along the way, he left the Army to study finance and economics on the GI Bill, then returned to service after 9/11. After retiring as a lieutenant colonel, he moved into technology, drawing on his military experience to bridge the gap between operational needs and technical solutions. By the time we became classmates at BC Law, he had already navigated several major transitions.
My path to law school was much shorter. At Florida State University, I majored in political science and minored in both Chinese and general business, initially seeing law as a way to enter politics. My undergrad work experience gradually shifted my interests toward corporate law and broadened my understanding of the profession. For Keith, coming to BC Law meant returning to the classroom after years in the workforce; for me, it meant staying in the classroom to prepare for a career of my own.
Like me, Keith had considered law school for years. “It was always kind of a through line,” he told me, reflecting on the role law had played in his past work. He enjoyed thinking and talking about legal issues, and retirement gave him an opportunity to pursue that interest. However, returning to school also required sacrifices I never had to make. He had to consider the cost of school, three years away from the workforce, and his responsibilities to his wife and child. When I asked whether leaving his career felt frightening or exciting, he answered, “It was a little bit of both.” While I had my own hesitations entering law school, they centered on whether I had gained enough experience to take that next step. Getting into BC Law felt like an opportunity I was fortunate to receive, rather than an outcome I had expected. When I shared that feeling with Keith, he recognized it immediately. “When I got that letter, I felt incredibly privileged,” he said. I had assumed that someone with his experience would take his acceptance to BC Law in stride. Yet at 21 and 51, we both received the news with the same disbelief: they had chosen us.
Once law school began, we both had to adjust to a new way of learning. “I feel like I’m being rewired a little bit,” Keith told me, a feeling I recognized all too well. Coming straight from college, I was used to the classroom, but the Socratic method felt foreign. While I knew cold calls were opportunities to learn, I often worried more about what a wrong answer said about me than what it could teach me. Keith approached that uncertainty differently. “I’d rather be wrong in a cold call,” he said, explaining that he would rather correct a misunderstanding in class than carry it into a final exam. His perspective helped me see mistakes as part of a process we were both going through: learning to think like lawyers.
As we adjusted, the challenges we faced inside the classroom gave us common ground outside it. When I asked Keith what helped him connect with fellow classmates, he called it “shared suffering.” He explained, “We all have our different lives on the outside, but we’re all going through the same academic challenge.” There was something comforting about that: we did not need to have lived similar lives to help each other through this part of them. I had been so focused on what my classmates had already done and what I still had to do that I overlooked what we were doing together. Whatever our backgrounds, we were working through difficult readings, preparing for cold calls, and trying to make sense of material that was new to all of us. Those daily demands gave us reasons to turn to one another. I realized I had let differences in life experience make my classmates seem further away than they really were. The people I had been measuring myself against were also people I could lean on when I doubted myself.
Even as we connected over the pressures of law school, our different backgrounds shaped how we managed them. Keith described setting aside specific blocks of time and using them deliberately, knowing his responsibilities outside class left little room to waste. Beyond those habits, what stuck with me most was how he understood the difficulty of law school itself. “Law school is hard, but it’s not the hardest thing I’ve done,” he told me. Those words reflected 27 years of service to our country, a second career, and a perspective I was only beginning to develop.
Having gone straight from college to law school, I found it too easy to let a difficult class or anxiety about my future take up more of my attention than it deserved. For Keith, though, a career and responsibilities had given his life meaning long before law school and would continue to do so beyond it. I was still preparing for that stage of life, which made it easy to feel as though so much depended on what I did here. I began to see that law school could matter deeply without becoming everything. At 21, I am still learning how to prepare for my future without letting the fear of it consume the present.
Yet Keith’s perspective had not made him immune to the doubt I had brought into orientation. In fact, when I asked whether he ever experienced imposter syndrome, he answered, “Absolutely, every day.” He described meeting younger students who seemed so confident and prepared that he began questioning his own path. “Should I even be here?” he would catch himself asking. That was a question I asked myself every day. While I worried that I had arrived before gaining enough experience, he sometimes wondered why it had taken him so much longer to get here. What I had imagined as a head start had not spared him from feeling behind. We had both been measuring ourselves against people whose lives seemed to contain something ours lacked. Hearing him say it aloud made it harder to view my own uncertainty as proof that I was less capable than my classmates. The question I had carried out of orientation finally had an answer: Yes, he felt it too.
Near the end of our conversation, Keith offered a thought that stayed with me: “Whatever nontraditional path you have taken to get to BC, there’s a spot for you here.” He made sure to include my path in that observation, too, reinforcing what our conversation had taught me: despite our different experiences, we both belonged here. I had been so focused on the experience I still lacked that I had given little credit to the choices and work that had earned me a place here. His words helped me look back at the room I entered during orientation with a little more generosity toward my classmates and myself. I went into the conversation looking for what thirty more years might give me, but I left with a better understanding of what I already brought along.
Chris Campanella is a first-year law student and brand new Impact blogger at BC Law. Contact him at campanc@bc.edu.
