gwax's rumblings

This evening I watched The Paper Chase with a few of the other law stu­dents here. For those of you that don’t know, The Paper Chase is about a few law stu­dents (one in par­tic­u­lar) going through their first year at Harvard Law School, with a par­tic­u­lar focus on their con­tracts class (and it’s pro­fes­sor). If you would like to get some idea of what law school is like, I rec­om­mend watch­ing this movie as it has a lot of very accu­rate ele­ments. In spite of its accu­racy, The Paper Chase does not match up with my expe­ri­ence in a few key ways: none of my pro­fes­sors are quite as mean as Professor Kingsfield and none of my class­mates are quite as self-servingly cut­throat as most of the other stu­dents in the movie. The movie does, how­ever, give a seem­ingly accu­rate por­trayal of the work­load, class struc­ture, stress lev­els, sleep depri­va­tion and gen­eral style of the expe­ri­ence. I should like to add the caveat to every­thing pre­vi­ously said in this post that I’ve only fin­ished one month of my first term and things could change dra­mat­i­cally between now and finals.