Now, I've never served in the armed forces. Truthfully, for most of my life the closest I've come to battle experience is the psychological warfare that goes on between teenage girls. However, on some level law school is much like being at war.
My crim law professor this past semester was a former army JAG officer, who, every chance he got, liked to compare law school to going into battle. All semester long you train and prepare for the big fight (in case I've failed to mention this before, in the majority of law classes the final is worth 100% of your grade). Then when it comes time to study it's like loading your fighter plane with ammo. The plane should be well fueled and ready to go - eat and sleep properly. You have to maneuver the plane through the battle field (final) and hit only the assigned targets. As soon as you finish your first mission you must immediately move on to preparing for the next. Anyway, you get the picture...
For most of the semester I thought he was just using this tired metaphor as a way to reminisce about his army days. Though, now that I have gone through my first battle I fully understand what he meant. Since finals have ended I have absolutely had PTSD type flashbacks of things that I may or may not have missed or answered incorrectly on my exams. Additionally, a week ago I took some law school friends with me to a Christmas themed pub crawl that some non-law school acquaintances had put together. Even after we had each consumed enough alcohol to kill a small child, we could only stand in the back and watch the non-law school crowd dance and laugh the night away. It was like the world was a little darker for the four of us because we knew how bad things could be. We had been through the trenches and had seen things that could not be unseen.
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