From Your SBA President, Katie Smith

February 3, 2015

From the moment you stepped into this school, law students, lawyers, and others whose lives seem to revolve around TJSL and the practice of law surrounded you. Quickly, school becomes a place to make friends, socialize, study, eat, and it controls many other aspects in your life. 

Suddenly, perhaps before you actually realize what is happening, you may have been sucked into a very small world, with very small pieces of drama that all of a sudden take precedent in your life. Everyone has an opinion and wants everyone else to know that opinion; so many opinions start floating around that you just want to be heard, and it sounds like “Oh My Goodness, can you believe . . .”

Law school is important. Friends at the school are important. Focusing on whatever helps you get through the day is important. But at the end of the day if you are sitting at home, stressing about something someone said, you get to decide whether or not you are going to lose sleep over it.

We should all be adults at school, but I’ve seen it quite a bit in three years, we lose track of our adulthood somewhere along the way. 

I like to use the five-year rule. In five years, is this going to matter to me? In five years is anyone going to care about what happened in this specific instance? If the answer is no, then I do not need to lose sleep over it at night. 

The things that are going to matter in five years to me are not the politics of law school. The things that will matter are the relationships I have made and how much effort I put into my own successes and failures. 

Every now and then, we need to remember that the world is bigger than law school. We need to expand our horizons and our thinking. When everything starts bearing down on us, take a deep breath and ask whether or not it will matter in five years. And if it won’t? Let it go, and look beyond the minutia.