Realities of Law School Scholarships

I kept mine. I am grateful. I found out yesterday and it is still sinking in. But the relief that came with that news was tempered by information that a good friend of mine didn’t meet with the same success.  We started together, studied together, shared our concerns and our successes, and met each others’s families. We are both non-traditional students. Beyond that, our similarities end.  I’m a lifelong resident of the state I live in. The other person uprooted an entire family to get here. If one of us was in a better position to lose the scholarship, it was me. I still have a career here. But so it is. Any scholarship that is attached to a class rank is subject to being lost at the end of 1L year. It has been a humbling experience to say the least, and for my friend, perhaps life-altering. I need more time to decide how I feel about this situation, because hard work on its own, innate ability as reflected in GPA’s and LSAT scores on its own, or even the combination of the two is insufficient to insure success. As for the soft factors that were considered for these scholarships, both my friend and myself are the same people that we were before school started. Our life experiences, personality traits, and worthwhile goals and objectives have not changed. It is hard for me to say that either of us is less deserving of the scholarship today than we were last year at this time. Perhaps neither of us deserved it in the first place.  The optimist in me doesn’t want to believe the theory that the law school gives 1L’s money as a bribe to raise their ranking while expecting a certain percentage to fail. But no matter how you look at it, if you accept a scholarship that requires a certain GPA or class rank to retain that scholarship, you simply must consider what would happen to you if you lost it. For me, the risk would have been worth it anyway. For my friend, different decisions might have been made. Top half is not a given, no matter how accustomed you are to being at the top of the class. So….good luck to all those reading. I need some more time to adjust my attitude. For today, I am depressed and contemplative. I need to figure out what I want to do with this educational opportunity. I need to take full advantage of it this coming year, because a third year is not an automatic given. I’m not going to spend my year obsessing about grades, that is for sure. I’ll write again soon. Thank you to all my readers for over 7000 hits to this blog, I appreciate it.