Waking Up and Saying, "I Think I'll Go to Law School Today!"

I found this article entitled The Mighty Esquire: 12 Step Program to Law School on the website www.twixtmagazine.com and I thought it was really funny and often sounded like the steps I took last year (some of which I will need to take again this year) in my pursuit of a legal education. If you've been there, you will totally appreciate this.

by Erin Spradlin
© 2005 twixtmagazine.com

1.) Age 18: After years of coddling by your parents who pay your bills, make your bed and do your dishes, stumble into college advisor’s office. Think about fact that even if it is archaic and fucked up, you hope that an inheritance or “marrying well” is in your future. Lost in this dream, spit out “Anthropology” or something arbitrary when asked what you want your major to be. Ignore the next four years worth of signs that say your only future is in your parents’ basement.

2.) Age 24: Although you are not adverse to your parents’ cable package or the free meals, start to feel slight embarrassment at direction of life. Perturbed that the Level II Customer Service Technician with the Ferrari poster in his cubicle keeps insisting that you remind him of him in his youth, you start to consider post graduate degrees.

3.) Watch last ten minutes of Law & Order and feel self over come with deluded fantasies of how the American legal system works. Law school it is!

4.) Lose law school inspiration during brief romantic stint that is curbed by your parents’ constant presence and knowing eyes. Find inspiration again upon reading the family Christmas letter and discovering you are by far the worst, most disappointing part about it.

5.) Sign up for pre-LSAT class (offered by Kaplan or the Princeton Review). Feel nausea as you experience first departure of $1000 allotment on glorious legal path. Feel more sick upon realizing it’s actually $1300 (without tax!) Attend class once a week for fourteen weeks leading up to LSAT date. Focus on dumbest person in class to bring self esteem back where it should be.

6.) Register for the worst test you will ever take in your whole life, (worse even than that test you took on your campus’s HIV awareness day) the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT.) Feel annoyance at discovery that before you can actually register for the LSAT, you must get to know the Law School Admissions Counsel (LSAC)- which is an online database that does legal “stuff.” (www.lsac.org.)

Within the LSAC site, there is something called the Law School Data Assembly Service (LSDAS) which will send a report (when the time comes) to your schools of choice that contains the following information: an undergraduate academic summary, copies of undergraduate transcripts, LSAT scores, and letters of recommendation.

You know this is going to cost you or your parents money, and your right – it is! $113 dollars to be exact. However, if you are truly serious about law school, there is no way around the LSAC or the LSDAS- unless, of course, you live in Canada.

7.) Sheepishly ask your parents for an additional $123.00 (the cost of registering for the LSAT.) If they seem disgruntled, explain to them that you’ll make it up to them in the future by suing wealthy people, regardless of their guilt.

If you decide you want to switch test dates after you register, well, surprise, surprise- it’ll cost you $32. If you decide you are, in fact, too dumb to attend law school and decline to take the test all together, you will be penalized $79.00 for your efforts.

8.) You will be very, very sad if you arrive at the test center sans your admission ticket, because you will be disqualified from taking the LSAT. Assuming you want to go forward with the “soul crusher” though, make sure you show up with your admissions ticket and a current ID. Number two pencils would also be helpful.

If you sense that you did very, very poorly –Connie Chung singing on a piano- poorly, you can take your test to the administrator at the end and tell said person that you don’t want it counted. You will never know the score or see the test again.

If you do get your score, and are displeased with it, you can take the test up to three times in two years. Likewise, LSAT scores stay valid for five years.

9) After waiting 3-6 weeks for results, decide if you want to proceed or if you want to get a Ferrari poster for your cubicle.

Assuming you want to proceed, start collecting transcripts and letters of recommendation.

Schools may vary in their requirements, but the LSDAS wants two letters of recommendation. For reasons unbeknownst to me, if you have been in the work force for less than five years, they want your letters of recommendation to be from professors- even if an employer/supervisor/etc. would be far more qualified to attest to where you are in life and how serious you take your work product.

10.) And, finally, it is time to search deep, deep inside your soul and come up with two double spaced pages on why you want to pursue law. It is unacceptable to state that you a.) want to make a lot of money or b.) are very, very stupid at picking out undergraduate degrees and feel that you have no other choice. They don’t want a full scale explanation of your academic record, nor do they necessarily want a sappy tale on the saddest thing that ever happened to you that transformed you into a moral super hero.

There is room for humor, if you are funny. Mostly though, it should be akin to a cover letter. These two pages should expand on the qualities that are best about you that you cannot appropriately put down on a resume and which would be a good qualities in a lawyer. Are you a good listener? Are you anal as hell? Do you like to designate photocopying to other people? And, it needs to read well- like a well crafted essay (because that’s what it's supposed to be). They are reading a lot of these things, and it wouldn’t hurt if yours was memorable (in a good way, not a Connie Chung/pianos way) for its content.

11.) Once your LSDAS file is complete- which if you have followed all of the above steps it is now- you should pick your schools. These schools will then have an online application (most likely) for you to fill out and want a copy of your LSDAS report.

You should apply to a minimum of three schools. The first school should be a school where much smarter, better looking people will actually go and hope that something has gone horribly wrong within their system and they let you in. This probably won’t happen, but what probably will happen is that they will send you an unforgivably thin envelope and tears will commence. You should apply to a school where people with a similar LSAT/GPA attend. You will most likely get into this school as long as your essay and recommendations are solid. On the mere chance that they are not, you should apply to a lesser school, so that you can either go to law school or say, snidely, later in life, “I was accepted to law school- I just chose not to go.”

The one factor all three of these schools should share is a good bar pass rate. That is far and away more important than their “tier” status. There are four tiers for law schools, but bar pass rate is really what counts. 80% and higher is a feasible percentage.

Prepare to give all three of these schools, the one you’ll never get into, the one you’ll probably get into and the one you don’t want to go to, $50.00 a piece. That’s how much they charge to read your Wonderful Me Essay.

12.) Once you get the “thicker” envelope, you know the envelope that makes you a decent dinner party topic again for your parents and not a change of subject, accept their admissions offer with a significant check addressed to their school. Stop spending money on yourself immediately. Fill out your Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) immediately. Do everything that you thought might be fun before the worst three years of your life begins. And, last but not least, congratulate yourself.

..and a Twixter is WHAT exactly?

Apparently I'm a little slow on the uptake, because I just recently learned of the Twixter Phenomenon that was officially introduced by Time magazine in 2005. The ironic part: I'm a "twixter" through and through, and I'm glad to realize I'm not alone.

Time published an article examining 18-25 year old people who experience an extra developmental phase in their lives between adolescence and adulthood. Historically, humans have developed from babies to children to adolescents to adults. Recently, there seems to have been a cultural change that created an interim, or sort of pause, that delays the onset of archetypal "adult" characteristics (getting married, having children, buying a home). 30 years ago, the average woman was married by 21 and had her first child at 22; now the average woman gets married and has a child at the age of 25. The statistics and evident shift in lifestyle are so flagrant that social scientists, psychologists, and other experts have conducted exhaustive research and discovered a newly-evolving demographic group; referred to as "kidults," "boomerang kids," "thresholders," and "emerging adults" - going through the "youthhood" or "adultescence." Essentially, more and more 20-somethings are taking longer than 4 years to graduate from college, and post-graduation they start to flail a little bit - often hopping from job to job, avoiding committed relationships, acting like they did as teenagers, or moving back home with their parents... All as a way to avoid impending doom, a.k.a. responsibility. They seem to constantly be between and betwixt (and since tweener has recently been assigned to the pre-teen, Hannah Montana-loving crowd, we got twixter by default. I guess at least it doesn't rhyme with weiner I suppose. That's a plus). I think this betwixt phase is easier for people to grasp if they think of it as a quarter-life crisis.

More and more 20-somethings started going through an evidently difficult phase in life, and it started to scare the crap out of older generations. Sociological, psychological, and demographic research was undoubtedly the mandatory action - those Baby Boomers really needed to know what the hell was wrong with people who didn't want to marry at 21, didn't want children at 22 (if ever), didn't find a job right after graduation, or took longer than 4 years to graduate. The result: a better understanding of why our generation acts the way it does, more sympathy towards us, and the piéce de rèsistance: an official label (we have Time to thank for that).

So.. What are the reasons for the twixter phenomenon? Simply put, life is getting harder and it's taking us longer to become adults - on various levels.

COLLEGE. Back when our parents were our age, a college degree was like a Golden Ticket to a career. Since the 1970s, there has been a 53% increase in people who attend college - making college degrees worth less and less in the job market. Personally, I have a bachelor's degree in psychology that has done absolutely nothing for me since graduation - it's one of those degrees you know is useless but you stick with it anyway for whatever reason (my reason was that changing majors would extend my graduation date, which my parents were not cool with). That leads me to the next characteristic of college that has changed over the years: the average amount of time it takes to graduate. Obviously, it has gone up - the new average college student takes five years to graduate, not four. I know this stresses parents out - mine were SO adamant that I graduate in 4 years. It wasn't an argument, I really had no options (all I can say about that is "oops"). I totally wish I didn't feel so pressured to finish in a certain amount of time, because I feel like I missed out on the chance to make the most of my college experience. My final GPA is just horribly embarrassing and so much less than what I'm capable of - I was in such a hurry to graduate that I really didn't care about my grades. Also, I grew less and less interested in my major after my sophomore year and eventually found it really tedious and boring and pointless to study because I had no intention of going to graduate school for psychology - and there's no way I can be enthusiastic about going to class if I really don't care what I'm learning. Now I'm paying the price, as I'm learning via the law school application process. As for the useless degree? I'm unemployed - in case you need proof.

Also an issue with college graduates: the debt acquired while in college is taking much longer to pay off, which delays the financial stability indicative of "adulthood." Crap gets more expensive as time goes on. Plus, students depend on loans more often than grants, which used to be the other way around when college wasn't as expensive.

EXPECTATIONS. The way I'm gonna describe this is a gross over-generalization, but it's really the easiest way for me to do it so deal with it. Twixters grew up in the 1990s and witnessed - pretty much daily - the impact of the internet and how easy it was for people to strike it rich almost overnight (improved communication makes it easier to start a small business, buying stock became easier, people started selling their junk on eBay for some serious coin, etc.). In a time of instant gratification (and in a society that drools over it), we're kind of conditioned to expect immediate results; unfortunately, life doesn't really work that way, and it causes a lot of anxiety when we don't get an instant fix all the time. Something I've personally noticed the most among my circle of friends is the desire to live the same lifestyle that our parents do, at half their age. Again, that instant gratification expectation kicks in and we just want to live like that now. Another lovely way to crash, burn, and have a quarter-life crisis.

Our generation has really been fed the idea that "one can accomplish whatever they set their mind to," and that our options are limitless. We're told to do something that we LOVE for a living, and that work should be enjoyable. So if we find ourselves working a job that we hate, we'll quit because we really want to find our career - we're idealists at the core, and we're holding off for that perfect job. For that perfect mate. For that perfect opportunity.

We were also raised with the expectation that our college degrees would be worth something. It's kind of a cruel smack in the face when you finally graduate and nothing changes. I mean seriously... Society kinda deals us a crap hand.

SOCIALLY ACCEPTABLE BEHAVIOR. In recent years, the idea of getting married and starting a family later in life has become more widely accepted and practiced. People are becoming more and more independent and self-relient, and popular culture often portray being single as a glamorous, fun, desireable way to spend your 20s, 30s, 40s - or eternity (Sex and the City, anyone?). Some people have absolutely no desire to start a family. Some people want to have as much fun as they can before they tie themselves down, so they live it up until then. Whatever the reason, it's not frowned upon anymore when people make the decision to stay unattached. The idea of dating a variety of people has started to progress from a promiscuous, slutty, dangerous generalization into a something more understood, accepted, and attributed to the desire to find a soul mate - not just a spouse. Perfection takes time to find...



Most of the experts conclude that twixters are melting down, moving home, and putting off responsibility by no fault of our own; growing up is simply harder than it used to be, thanks to how we are groomed by society. Some say we are way more concerned than previous generations when it comes to making a successful, meaningful, enjoyable transition into adulthood, so we'll put it off until conditions are right. Idealism and self-actualization are really important to a lot of twixters because our society (which has become increasingly liberal over time - another thing that scares some older people) has told us it should be. For the most part, the experts say that this period of self-discovery is a positive thing that should be used to experience as much as we can, to learn and grow as people, and that it should be used to our advantage. Nonetheless, twixters are perceived as lazy, indecisive, confused, and even frightening to some people. Experts say that's just a misunderstanding. They also say twixters are officially here to stay; the phenomenon is predicted to be permanent. It's global too; though they're known in other countries by other names:

• Boomerang Kids - Canada
• Kippers (acronym that stands for Kids In Parents Pocketbooks Eroding Retirement Savings) - England
• Tanguy Syndrome (named after the movie Tanguy, about a man living with his parents) - France
• Nesthocker (translation: Nest Squatter) - Germany
• Mammone (word for a young man who loves mama's cooking) - Italy
• Freeter (combo of words meaning "free" and "worker") - Japan (the trend has even been debated in Japanese congress)

Although I'm not exactly thrilled by the idea that the label given to my generation sounds like a candy bar, I'm just thankful for the awareness that has come with it. I never felt as though my generation was a part of Generation X; I actually get really annoyed when my peers claim that we are. So I was very pleased to learn of this twixter phenomenon for 2 reasons: 1) my generation has a label distinguishing us from Generation X - giving us our own identity (or prejudice, depending on how you look at it), and 2) I'm not the only one who feels overwhelmed by the onset of adulthood. Its the hallmark of our generation.