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I Didn’t Get An Award I Wanted, But Failing Gave Me a Necessary Epiphany
I will never be satisfied, even if I were the best.
I spent the last year of law school trying as hard as I can, partially aiming for an award (magna cum laude) based on a cutoff of GPA. My GPA had to rank in the top 10% of my class for this honor. While a lot of people told me to chill out and relax a bit because I was a third-year law student who already had a job, I was gunning for magna cum laude.
Throughout law school, I was an evening law student who worked during the day as a special education teacher and then went to law school at night. Anyone knows that working in special education is not an easy job at all, and I worked in an urban school district where students had a lot of needs beyond their disabilities. This made my traverse through law school a bit more difficult than most.
I went from a 3.35 GPA after my first year of law school as an evening law student to a 3.84 GPA, getting the highest grade in the class in several of my classes after the first year, including curved, doctrinal (classes every law student has to take), like Contracts and Torts. After my first year, I averaged above a 4.0 GPA based on several highest grades in the class, earning me discretionary A+’s, of which only a few are granted. I spent hours…
