Bad Glacier

So I’m back from Preview Weekend at the University of Michigan Law School. I visited the University of Virginia back in the fall, but this the first admitted student event I’ve been to. In short, the school was really pretty, the people were fun and interesting, and the food was edible… for the most part.

Also, I met foxes. Ladies, he’s everything you’ve been dreaming.

(Note: this is an insanely long post, so I’m putting the rest below the fold. Good luck.)

Edit: For anyone else looking at Michigan, Taco John posted a good comment. Be sure to check it out.

Okay, here we go.

Thursday:

The first event of Thursday afternoon was a talk by the Dean of the Law School, Evan Caminker. After an introduction from Sarah Zearfoss, Dean of Admissions and the person responsible for coming up with something nice to say on each person’s personalized admission letter, Dean Caminker promptly brought up Michigan’s weather, which would be a major theme of the weekend. Dean Caminker noted that he a California boy at heart, but Michigan’s greatness overcame the bad weather and lack of beaches, and now he was hooked. This was probably the best handling of the weather issue all weekend. Responses ranged from claims that “you’ll get used to it” (and you will, sort of), to apologies, to complete denial of reality (”it’s so beautiful in the winter you won’t even mind”), but Dean Caminker’s acknowledgement that the weather sucks but the other aspects of the school make up for that downside was the most realistic treatment.

Next up was a student panel, followed by a question and answer period. The students were, of course, interesting and enthusiastic, and the Q&A was nice, but the event was notable in another way; it provided us the first look at “that guy.” You know, the person where, if you overhear another group talking about him, you wouldn’t feel uncomfortable jumping in and saying, “oh, you’re talking about that guy,” and everyone laughs, knowing that you share a common enemy. He’s the person that breaks the unspoken rules of these events, asking speakers to point out bad things about a school, monopolizing the Q&A period by asking multiple-part questions, and just generally being an annoying jerk. If we were in law school, he’d be a gunner, but here he can only get the personal attention he craves by jumping in headfirst whenever a speaker asks for questions.

Luckily, there was only one. It can get nasty when several people start fighting to be that guy.

Then we broke up into small groups and took a tour of the Law School. The gothic architecture is very cool and the classrooms look nice, but I noticed that none of the chairs had any padding. I know they want to keep us awake, but that’s just bad form. Also, our tour guide noted that the school is considering cutting off wireless internet access to classrooms. Again, bad form. For the amount of money we’ll be paying, the administration shouldn’t treat us like children. We’re allowed to act the part; they just aren’t supposed to acknowledge it.

After the tour, we ate some not-really-very-good pizza, and headed over to the Student-Funded Fellowships auction. To raise money for students working unpaid or low-paid public interest summer jobs, students bid on dinner with their professors, trips to Alaska, a tour of the Supreme Court building led by a current clerk for Justice Souter, and other things donated by students, faculty, or alumni. I was amazed that the winning bids were often (almost always for events involving faculty, it seemed) over $600. I know it’s for a good cause and I know summer associates at big firms light their cigars with twenties, but still…

The auction got old quick, and it was St. Patrick’s Day, so a group of us walked around ’til we found a bar. Events started at 8:00 am the next day, however, so we didn’t stay long. It had started snowing by the time we left, so we walked through the law quad. With a light dusting of snow over everything, the buildings were beautiful.

Friday:

8:00 am: Financial Aid Presentation
9:00 am: Externships and Joint Degrees Discussion
9:35 am: Career Opportunities Panel

I’m sure these were informative for some people, but not really for me. I don’t think the financial aid thing told me anything new, I left for most of the joint degree talk, and the career opportunites panel just gave a whole new group of people a reason to talk about the weather and answer questions from that guy, so I didn’t get much out of them.

10:35 am: Mock Class

We were supposed to sit in on a real class later in the day, so Professor Sherman Clark took the opportunity to explain to us how classes operated and what the point of the Socratic method was supposed to be. He explained that the point of law school is to learn how to back up your arguments using legal precedent; this is the “thinking like a lawyer” we always hear about law school teaching us. There was a short reading that Professor Clark used to take us through a fake Socratic dialogue, just to show us what the teachers expect from us and how we were supposed to be thinking about the cases we read. Professor Clark ended by talking about the stereotype of the lawyer as disinterested advocate for whichever side pays him. He noted that law school teaches you to look at both sides of an issue, but this doesn’t mean you have to smother your morals and idealism once you graduate. The key to being a good lawyer is getting into your opponents’ head, understanding their point of view, and figuring out which strategy will best work against their argument. You can’t do this if you’re too emotionally involved in your case, so you have to let go of your personal feelings for a while, look at the issue from all angles, and make the best argument you can make to advance your cause.

This was inspiring–probably the highlight of the weekend. And he’s teaching Torts this summer. Oh man.

11:45 am: Bus Tour of Ann Arbor

Ann Arbor is a nice college town. Lots of fun restaurants and shops downtown, but not much outside of there.

I’m not used to the size of UM. The campus is so much larger than anything I’m used to. It seems a little intimidating, but the law school seems very self-contained; if you don’t want to, you don’t have to leave the law quad for much of anything.

1:10 pm: Constitutional Law class

Next, all the visiting kids sat in on Professor Joan Larsen’s Con Law class. They were talking about Presidential power, and the reading for the day was Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, which decided whether the President could detain, for an indefinite period of time, a U.S. citizen captured in Afghanistan and labeled a prisoner of war.

Professor Larsen did a good job. I was able to keep track of what was going on (I had read Hamdi last semester for a political science class), and things didn’t seem to be over my head. I think I might be able to handle this law school thing after all. Some students were prepared, some were obviously not. The ones that weren’t ready weren’t publicly humiliated; Professor Larson just called on someone else and class continued. All in all, this didn’t seem that bad. In fact, I’m a little disappointed that law school seemed so manageable.

2:30 pm: Faculty Panel

Another opportunity for a certain someone to ask questions and for the faculty to talk about the weather and expand on some of the other themes of the weekend: faculty lovin’, interdisciplinary learning, and UM Law as a national law school. No other schools were mentioned, but each of these themes was aimed at certain other law schools.

“Michigan faculty are not only accessible, but they actively seek you out and get to know you…” (unlike schools like Harvard, where the faculty are too busy writing books and working other jobs, or schools like Columbia and NYU, where the faculty have a fun city to run off into.)

“Michigan emphasizes a variety of viewpoints and perspectives. We’re not a monolithic school…” (like Chicago. They’re all, “law and economics, law and economics,” and we’re like, “psh, get a life, losers. The opportunity cost of kicking your ass is rapidly approaching zero. Except for you, Judge Posner. You’re cool.”)

“Michigan is a national law school; we send graduates all over the country…” (because they can’t stand to be in the Midwest any more. If you’re looking at a lower-ranked school, just give up now. We’re better than them. Unless you’re also looking at a higher-ranked school. Then… y’know, our faculty… they have nowhere to run, so you can bug them about recommendations whenever you want.)

3:50 pm: Housing Options

You can live in Ann Arbor or in the Lawyer’s Club or in the Phid House, which is like a fraternity house except not as nice (well, the fraternity houses I know are reasonably nice and not at a state school, so that might not really be true in general).

4:45 pm: Faculty Reception

Much more awkward and less cool than it sounds. Somehow (I’m pretty sure it was the alcohol), they convinced a bunch of professors to come down and force small-talk with all the admitted students. Of course, none of us knew anything about the subjects they taught, so we either had to smile and nod (most of us did this) or try to fake it (I’m sure the professors were laughing–or crying–on the inside).

6:15: pm Dinner

Dinner was much better than on Thursday. The lemon pepper chicken in particular was really good. We talked with a few admitted students. This was nice because the normal rules didn’t apply here; they could be more candid around a small group and we could ask more pointed questions without feeling like jerks.

7:15 pm: Coffee, Dessert, and Student Groups

A few student groups set up in the reading room and let us chat with them if we felt like it. There were some good desserts and they gave out some nice coffee mugs. At this point, we were approaching twelve hours straight of law school talk, so I skipped out on most of this event and went back to the hotel after grabbing a plate of food and my coffee mug.

8:30 pm: Phid House Happy Hour

The Phid (Phi Delta Phi, the “law fraternity”) House is a couple of blocks from the law school. They only had wine there, so I downed a glass, looked at one of the bedrooms, and went back to the hotel. The group I was hanging out with was originally planning on just dropping off our stuff and going out, but we started talking in the hotel room and didn’t stop until we all got tired and went to bed.

This was another highlight of the weekend. It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to have one of these crazy, free-ranging discussions with a group of fun, interesting, intellectually curious, ridiculously smart people, and anyways, I talked much less back then. Most of us are still considering other schools, so I don’t really know if this is a plus for Michigan, but if this is what law students are like, I’m gonna love it.

Saturday:

The 9:00 am breakfast was the best meal we had the entire weekend. Pancakes, sausage, ham-egg-cheese croissant things… good stuff. We listened to a panel of alumni (including a Supreme Court clerk) talk about their experiences, glared at that guy for one last time, and that was it. Preview Weekend was over. The group I was hanging around with went to Zingerman’s (a fairly famous deli/baker/creamery) for lunch (interesting and good, but expensive), hung around the law buildings for a while, then went home.

All in all, I had a great time. The law quad was beautiful (I might post more about this if I can find some pictures online to link to) and the professors and students seemed nice, reasonably approachable, and fairly low-key. Ann Arbor looked like a pleasant place to live, and the administration really seemed to care about making our experience enjoyable, which hopefully means they’ll put a similar amount of effort into making students happy once we’re at Michigan. Unlike Virginia, who has done a terrible job of getting me excited about visiting or attending the law school, Michigan really seems to be putting a lot of effort into convincing me to attend. I like that. Everyone likes to feel wanted.

I don’t like to rank schools without having visited them all, but Michigan jumped way ahead of Virginia in my informal, internal rankings. Not that I disliked UVa. I just liked Michigan a lot more. UM is also ahead of the vision of Columbia I’ve formed in my head, but until I visit, I have no idea what Columbia and New York City are really like. Between Harvard and Michigan, I have no clue. Still gotta visit Boston. Still gotta check out financial aid (for all the schools).

But I got a good feeling from my visit. I think I would really enjoy attending Michigan Law. And finding that out is really the point of a visit, right?

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 20th, 2005 at 5:48 pm and is filed under Applying to Law School. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.