Law school can be awful. The workload. The pressure. The stress. It’s not always an easy path. However, the study of law does have some redeeming qualities. For me, the best part is the people I have gotten the chance to interact with through this journey. One of those is Huma Rashid, a wise-cracking, whip-smart law student living and studying in Chicago. Her blog, The Reasonably Prudent Law Student, never fails to amuse. (I highly recommending reading through her archives.) After I mentioned her blog back in September, we started talking through the Interwebz and I became obsessed. Yes, that’s right. I became a fangirl. Every night after class, I would comb through her Twitter and laugh out loud at her astute observations. So I begged her to share some of her wisdom with us poor first-year students. I begged and I pleaded and after she finished her final exam, Huma answered all of my nagging questions. Enjoy.
Name: Huma Rashid
Age: 23.33 years
Year at Law School: 2L
Favorite Law School Class: Labor Law! I was originally stuck in Admin Law, which I hated exactly seven minutes into the class when I realized I was expected to know things. My LawSchoolBFF was in LaborLaw, one of two classes we didn’t have together for the first time ever, and it was taught by our favorite professor, who taught us Contracts in the fall semester of 1L. He convinced me to drop AdminLaw and take LaborLaw with him instead, and it was the best decision ever. I LOVE this professor like you wouldn’t believe, and it was great to take another class with him. He was the Chairman of the NLRB for about five years in the early seventies, and he’s the nicest man in the world. He loves Led Zeppelin and patting himself on the back.
Highlighters, Post-its, or Colored Pens: Highlighters! Unlike post-its, they don’t have adhesive parts that get un-sticky after a while, and they don’t stick out from the side of my book and get all folded and dumb. Colored pens are too high-maintenance. Highlighters are bright, bold, unassuming, and only want to be helpful. They’re not at all pretentious, come in more colors than I could possibly need, and I can buy 12 of them (6 colors) from Target for $3. Highlighters for the win!
Favorite studying location: When I’m at home, I love to study in my favorite armchair, but the setup isn’t ideal because I have to balance my USB mouse on the armrest, and if I jiggle the cord slightly, my netbook refuses to recognize it. But my armchair is right by the television, so I can put South Park on for the background noise and just work. That’s my favorite spot to study, but the spot where I get my most effective studying done is the dining room table. Ever since I was little, I loved spreading all my stuff out all over the whole dining table, forcing my family members to eat at the far end so they wouldn’t disturb anything, and just working around the clock. When I’m at school, I snag a spot in the 5th floor lounge, on one of the couches by the heaters. Library cubicles make me want to jump off the side of the building (I’d land in front of the federal court house, seat of the 7th circuit, if I did this), and besides, this 1L that looks JUST like Hugh Laurie likes to sit on the couch right across from me, so the lounge wins every single time.
What you plan to do with your law degree: I plan to parlay it into a career in publishing or something having to do with literature or academia, something in that area. Ideally, I’d be an editor for a great publishing house and I’d just sit around all day and read manuscripts for really bad romance novels and laugh at all the ridiculous euphemisms like ‘meat whistle.’ That’s the life. That’s the American dream, really.
Why law school: My father basically pushed me to go to law school. He’d always wanted to be a lawyer, but when he was in school, there was a national need for civil engineers and the like in his country, so he went that route, and he wanted to go to law school when he moved to America in the early seventies, but it just never happened. Like most parents, he wanted to see me get into a stable career (HA! You can’t call the legal profession stable anymore!), making a decent living wage (oh, I crack myself up), happy (pardon me, it’s time to go take my ulcer medication), and he also wanted to see me being able to do something he wasn’t able to do. I don’t blame him for any of that; he just wanted what he thought was best for me. But it’s precisely why I tell all those people who come to me and tell me they’re thinking about law school one thing: when it comes to advice about law school or the legal field at large, do not listen to anyone who isn’t a lawyer or hasn’t gone to law school. Anyone who isn’t a part of this horrendous cult only knows whatever they think they know about lawyers, law school, and the law from TV shows and the movies, which are terribly inaccurate. People considering law school need to find lawyers or law students or others similarly situated and talk things over with them to get a real sense of what they’ll be getting themselves into.
Favorite study music: Baroque music! Also, Mozart if I have no baroque music on hand, and Hindi music (think Bollywood circa the 1950s and 1960s, absolutely no later). It’s a little difficult for me to listen to Western music while reading casebooks written in English. With baroque music and Mozart, they’re all instrumental pieces, often characterized by repetition, which I find helpful particularly when I’m binge-studying before an exam. With Hindi music, I can sing along and be aware of the lyrics/story/poetry of the song while still being able to process the legal material written in English. It keeps me happy and energized because it’s so upbeat, and it feels like I’m accessing different parts of my brain to register the Hindi words I’m hearing and the English words on the page, while making sense of both.
When did you start blogging: I had a personal blog in high school – a pitiful little Xanga. Remember those? I was in high school at the time, and suddenly it seemed like my dumb little blog was causing all sorts of drama, mainly because some members of the Chicagoland Indian/Pakistani Muslim community that I find myself a part of found my blog and decided I was saying things that a proper little Desi girl shouldn’t be saying, so I just got fed up and took the whole thing down. I didn’t blog again until I started law school. I had lent my LawSchoolBFF my “Arrested Development” DVDs, and he particularly liked the character of Bob Loblaw, Attorney at Law, played by Scott Baio. He decided that he’d start a blog as Bob BlahBlawg, which he did, and then I figured I’d start my own. I originally had a LiveJournal for it and then moved on to WordPress, and I’ve been there since maybe late 2008 or early 2009. Not very long at all.
Sites you blog at: I blog at my site, The Reasonably Prudent Law Student. I do a Business Casual Superstar series there (the LawSchoolBFF came up with that name; I’ve got to give him credit, otherwise he’ll probably cry – he’s a fragile little thing, really), and a friend of mine urged me to start another blog where I had more freedom with the outfits I put together, so I started Dress Like A Soap Star where I basically put outfits together and make fun of soap operas. It’s just something to keep me entertained, and channel the crazy into a relatively harmless outlet. If I didn’t have my BCS series and my soap opera blog (note: I do not watch soap operas), I’d probably be off sacrificing small animals or throwing sandwiches at cars or something. As far as more serious blogging goes, I contribute to Social Media Law Student and do a bi-weekly podcast with my fellow contributor, Josh Camson. I focus mainly on technology and law, and try to sneak a fake and possibly defamatory Facebook feed in there somewhere. I’ve also contributed blog posts to different fashion and law blogs that I follow and enjoy.
Read more at Q&A with Huma Rashid: Part II
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