So most of you know already, but I've decided to commit to Columbia.
I've talked about this with a lot of people (including a rather unpleasant woman at NYU) and I think, in the end, Columbia is a better choice, mostly because it's more or less a tie (with things like Columbia's Ivy League status and NYU's stronger human rights program all kind of washing each other out) and Columbia offered me a lot more money and better housing. To be clear, it's not like I made this decision based on housing and money -- I think that Columbia's Human Rights Internship Program (HRIP) is competitive with NYU's and that was THE most important consideration -- but money did help break the tie (which was, money and housing aside, originally tipped in NYU's favour).
Moving on, I've spent the past 22 hours since I decided, well, not doing much CLS-related stuff, but I have found a couple blogs by Columbia Law School students, and I wanted to share a few words from the Serious Law Student blog. It's the earnest, and in my opinion quite helpful (in terms of anticipating starting at Columbia) blog, written by a Korean-American gay NYU graduate, who I really like (so far) but who I think is very intellectually different from me.
A few quick things:
1. The description of having to fill-out Columbia's grant recipient bio is HILARIOUS because he's so intimidated by the sample bio they give (and those of us who have even briefly contemplated things like the Rhodes and have read recepient bios can totally sympathize):
I've finished the bio part for my Grant Data Sheet, so I figure I'll post it
here. I felt ridiculous writing it, especially since I had to use
third-person narrative, and the example bio they give you is so
intimidating. The sample bio is of some girl who has a master's from
Harvard's Kennedy, worked in international banking, speaks three foreign
languages fluently, plays classical piano and kickboxes, went to Zimbabwe for
public interest work, etc etc. This girl cannot be real. Jesus, I
bloody hope this isn't going to be all of my classmates. I had so much
difficulty writing mine, because honestly, what have I accomplished? I've
led such an unremarkable life, what is there to tell of it? I'm just
thankful I got into Columbia.
I think that, in addition to us just being different people and having different intellectual approaches to our surroundings, a huge difference between us is that he is straight out of undergrad, which I think leads to a lot of worry and insecurity (some if it well-placed) that I don't have, not only because I am just older and have more experience (and perhaps feel more entitled?) but also because I've now known SO many people in and out of the law school system (and have had the opportunity to learn more than a fair bit about the academic/professor/hiring side of law schools) that I feel like I'm going in as prepared as a person can be.
2. Another thing I found HILARIOUS on the blog was the following observation about Columbia's orientation gifts:
Orientation began Thursday morning with packet pick ups at the law school.
I was given enormous packets of information in a cumbersome Columbia Law School messenger bag that evidently they hope the incoming 1Ls will proudly display. I think I’ll be sticking to my Kenneth Cole leather messenger, but I guess you can’t say no to a free bag.
Spoken like a true queen lol. Replace Kenneth Cole with Marc Jacob (ok he doesn't really do messengers, but one can dream) and I am RIGHT there with him!
3. It feels odd to be reading this blog, at times, because it begins the summer after I graduated Columbia and started at HHR, and ends now (well it's still going...but the person is graduating).
The first day of orientation was the day of the 2003 New York blackout. He writes about going out with fellow Columbia students to a local night spot and then walking on the street late into the night and seeing families on their stoops and people all over the street.
I was one of those people.
I'd walked from the financial district to Morningside (the longest walk of everyone on our team, except I only had 12 flights of stairs to go up, unlike poor Juicy! and since we were not in a high-rise, as 12 floors in Manhattan is NOT a high-rise lol, we still had water) and was, of course, greeted by my pernicious first boyfriend (let's call him: Ivan the Terrible). I was struck, when reading this blog, because it brought back so vividly what I felt that night, which was one of our last nights together (I made my clandestine escape on 6 September).
The night was a gorgeous night, but not for me. The streets *were* filled, and although there was that feeling of tension, or mischief, that you get in any setting where alcohol might be flowing a bit too freely (as it was with many of the stoop-sitters), there was still a sense of community, relaxation, and resignation to something bigger (the City) that I hadn't felt since the days after 9-11.
For me, the night highlighted a fact about my life, then, my split life, which is that when your life is split, one part is (more or less) invisible. Because of the late-night confession to my mother about what was going on the day before we flew to Bulgaria in July, which retrospectively explained what it was I couldn't explain in the weeks leading up to graduation, my life was not entirely invisible. It was in the files of Dean's offices, different John Jay Hall health offices, and there was a former TA/mentor (who is still a valued friend -- more like family, in a way) who was the first person I told about what was happening. Beyond that, though, there were my Columbia friends who, all but one, I'd cut out of my life with one email from Macedonia (even at the time, I understood that I was hurt that they couldn't figure out what was happening without me telling them -- I couldn't tell them, but I needed so much for them, for someone, to know), my law firm, where I could sense everything was going great (especially with my teammate, who has become one of my most cherished friends), and what was an ostensibly functional and healthy life that was very much not the reality that was most relevant at the time.
I don't want to give the impression that it was the darkest time for me (and I don't intend that to be a pun on the blackout lol), because that darkest time was, without a doubt, before graduation. Looking back on my first meeting with someone from Columbia to discuss my situation, I realize how lucky I was that I said something (funnily-enough, it was because I felt like I owed an explanation to my professors about why I had stopped coming and couldn't complete my semester work), because finally something that was, to that point, 100% invisible was put, if only very slightly, into relief.
That said, it was still an extremely difficult time, because I had to be so patient and calculating in my plans (I just wrote an entry about my leaving him and moving out, but I've saved it for later, if I feel like talking about it, because I think it would be WAY tangential for this blog entry). I couldn't ask for help, so I needed to wait. Save money, find a flat, and wait.
The waiting was particularly difficult, because the invisibility of what was happening in my private life made escaping from it all the more difficult. The fact that I could STILL walk down the street with him, in the dark, towards Central Park West (we even walked down the street where Curie's aunt and uncle live, and where I'd been so many times) in tears and not be seen made me feel, as I had before, like that was the life I was bound for. He could berate me in the street where I'd walked with my best friend and her family, and were I'd run on so many days before, people and candles all around, and I could be totally broken-down in tears but still walking with him, and it was like we were any other couple walking on the street. That night, and I can recall with photorealism where we were on the street when he was saying these things, he was explaining to me why I wasn't an equal in the relationship and why my voice was less important than his, indeed not one he needed to take into consideration when acting, because he was so much older and was therefore more valid. There was only one valid person in the relationship and it was not me. It was not a dispassionate theoretical discussion about inter-age dating, I assure you, and I asked him at one point what he thought people were thinking, around us (the ones who didn't see us), when they saw him saying these things and they saw me crying. He told me what he had told me before: when people see us, they can see that we are truly in love.
I like thinking about that night as something different than it was. Maybe it wasn't my night of inequality, anymore, of crying on streets and near a park that I loved, and of being invisible. Maybe it was the exciting first night of law school for another young man who walked home that night with his friends in awe of the ambiance created by one of those rare instances in which the City stops and makes everyone appreciate its hugeness.
VC