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  • Saturday, January 14, 2006

    Observation of a Yalie

    One thing about taking the February bar is that the review courses are much smaller than (I expect) the summer class enrollment. It's either those of us who just finished, those who failed the first time around or those who for one reason or another (e.g. a clerkship or this is the second bar they are taking) are picking up the MD bar now.

    In that latter category is a woman in my bar review who went to Yale. She did a clerkship and now has to buckle down to get through this laborious and tedious process even though she graduated in 2004. Anyway, she asked me if I had gone to Yale, to which I responded something snarky like "Nah, no way I'm that smart."

    Anyway, that launched a chit-chat about Yale. I knew that they had no grades first year, but it turns out they have no grades ever. Just a P (pass), H (honors) or F (fail). The first year, they don't even get that. She also told me that this system made for some interesting characters at Yale (of which, she was definitely one), and that many of the students are only in law school while their true passions lie elsewhere -- they're writing the great American novel or finishing their PhDs or something. (Hmmm, wish I had enough extra brain power to be focused elsewhere and have law school as a side-gig!)

    And then she made a comment which amused me. In conjunction with the comments about the students having diverse, broad and sometimes distracted interests beyond school, she said something along the lines of "Yale is so small that every year is an experiment."

    Hmmm. That's interesting. There are so many ways to interpret that observation... I wonder if the converse (one of the many possible meanings) is true for my school -- that it's so large that creativity is precluded?

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