I wish I could be inspired to write one of those great 1L retrospectives, but I have no such motivation (nor nearly an exciting enough life). So all you’re going to get is my classic unordered list of things. This time it’s things I’ve been doing since I completed my first year of law school on May 13:
- Worked on redesigning Iowa’s College of Law website. So sad I just missed the glory of Tales from Redesignland, but I can say at least I haven’t experienced this yet.
- Started assembling a new website to compile Social Media Best Practices for Law Schools
- Checked my grades. Again and again and again. Nothing posted yet…
- Prepared for my remote summer internship at Montana Legal Services, starting June 1. Yay!
- Checked my grades. First one posted was Crim Law. Meh. Disappointment and self-doubt sets in.
- Shot video for Social Media Best Practices. I don’t need to see myself in HD, thanksverymuch.
- Watched Seasons 1-3 of Battlestar Galactica.
- Checked my grades. Con Law was up (which I didn’t expect until Halloween). Did much better than expected, thanks no doubt to analogies of dolphins and tunas. *Happy dance*
- Worked more and more on the law school website. I think they will like this color scheme stolen from whopooped.org…
- Checked my grades. Wait— WHAT?! I refreshed the page over and over but that 4.2 didn’t go away. Best. Grade. Ever.
- Checked the existing law school website for class rank information. Over and over and over. No luck yet.
I’ve also spent a fair amount of time the last few weeks chuckling at myself because I decided to not try so hard this semester and focus on being a good mom before being a good law student. Apparently that strategy had a positive impact on my grades. Yippee!
CALICON09 is happening June 18-20 at Colorado’s law school in Boulder. CALI, known to every law school in the country (save a few, like mine), is a place where law students learn and professors share, using modern internet technologies. One of the sessions at the conference this year will be presented by Harvard’s Berkman Center’s Co-director John Palfrey, author of the recent book about “digital natives,” Born Digital. (Palfrey will is also the conference’s keynote speaker.) The session will focus on how law schools can get smart about social media, from giving advice to students to addressing serious privacy concerns. My law school’s assistant dean, Steve Langerud, and I were invited to join in the conversation and share our experience at the University of Iowa College of Law in creating a social media best practices plan. (See Berkman fellow Gene Koo’s blog post about the workshop.)
The hope is to leave the conference with a working model for a social media plan that can be implemented for incoming students this fall. The best case will be schools setting up students, instructors and employers with meaningful advice and tutorials for productive social media use. The worst case, short of outright rejection by nostalgic administrators, will hopefully be careful and introspective critiques of the pros and cons of social media use by students, administrators and employers.
Thanks to Austin Groothuis at CALI for noticing Iowa Law’s project and to Gene Koo for connecting us with Berkman in this process.
If you’re going to CALI, I would love to see you there! Check out the CALICON whiteboard for details about a tweetup on the Friday evening of the conference.
In case you missed my earlier posts on Social Media Law Student about this project, please check out Part 1 and Part 2 there.
The building where I attend law school (note the massive grey dome) is lovingly known as the Death Star among a few of us. I have many critiques of this building. There’re few common areas: couches and not-so-comfy-or-clean chairs are haphazardly shoved into corners and on edges of walkways. None of the classrooms have windows to the outside world (intentional, I’m sure). Worst is the fact that the main stairway and every high traffic area (around the restrooms, locker room and cantina) actually gets narrower right where all of the 600 students and 100 faculty/staff pass each other many times each day. I have had more awkward, “Oh – sorry — excuse me!” moments and near-collisions in this building than in the rest of my life combined. Which of course improves on the already not-so-smooth feelings many of us have when wielding a 40 lb. backpack while balancing laptop, hot coffee and the hummus and pita chips that will be our 10:00 am lunch.
The law school used to be beautiful, but since I probably wouldn’t have been accepted as a law student before 1986 (when the College of Law moved into the Death Star, at which time I was only five years old), I won’t lament that fact too much.
The important thing is that today there is a space where I find refuge in the midst of narrowing hallways and spiraling office corridors (pdf) [ok, that's not really my law school - but apparently there's a trend of law buildings with the name Boyd being built in a circle.]. I’m hesitant to write about it because it’s been nearly a year and there’s never been another person in this sanctuary when I seek it out.
It’s on a hill, outside the building. There are old trees and wildflowers. Early spring brings out an undergrowth of Siberian scilla and creeping charlie. The few scraggly forsythia bushes burst with sprays of golden flowers before their leaves unfurl. A few weeks later the green leaves and white flowers of honeysuckle have emerged and verdant hillside beckons with clusters of violets and foxglove. Later the cultivated prairie plants thrive on the edge of the hill: purple coneflowers, black eyed susans and sunflowers. In the fall, the aged maples and ash grudgingly release eddies of brilliant golden leaves, with the orange-brown foliage of the oaks behind them. Grey squirrels and eastern chipmunks thrive here, as do all the migrating birds. Even bald eagles fly overheard in the winter on their way to the nearby river. I view all of this from an old, worn stone bench perched on the edge of the hill, built on the top of a crumbling limestone wall, giving way to the roots of trees and separating me from the traffic of the highway 60 feet below.
I am so very, very grateful for this sanctuary of wilderness so close to the center of the source of my three years of self-imposed and artificial stress that is law school.
[And there's wireless internet out here, too! I'm writing this while watching fat, fuzzy bumble bees and snuggly, soft baby bunnies frolic in the clover. But crap - I've got a civ pro exam in a couple of hours. Better get back to relaxing before I forget all there is to know about 28 USC 1367. Later!]
