At Ramard pier where I am waiting for another speedboat passenger to arrive. The tide is coming in, I can smell the salt. It’s a mangrove swamp so I watch the crabs and mudskippers come out to feed.
There is a full-arc rainbow overhead as the speedboat zips across the water to Koh Lanta. We come ashore at Saladan pier and a scant 10 minutes later, I am unloading my bags and looking for my bungalow.
The Thai auntie gives me a tabby cat to keep me company that night. The cat is very clingy.
Lawyer training, in many ways, is similar to raising a baby. *cue eye-rolling from billions of parents*
I feel as though I’m raising a baby lawyer – right now I am growing the lawyer I want to become, but that idea-lawyer is still very much a baby and as the progenitor, it’s basically all long days and sleepless nights and a lot of poopy diapers to clean up. Endless poopy diapers. Just non-stop.
And then once in a while the law-baby does something amazing (or rather, I find an absolutely fascinating facet of the law that leaves me marvelling at it for a while) and it’s like that moment when your baby smiles at you. This is my law-baby smiling at me.
And I hope that someday the poopy diapers will decrease and eventually stop, and there will be more smiles, and the law-baby will grow to the point of being somewhat independent and I’ll know all the slogging would have been worth it.
But right now, it’s just poopy diapers and it’s just something I’ll have to deal with in the process of raising (becoming) a lawyer I can be proud of.
Another one of the GLBs left the programme last week. He has a Master’s degree from Yale, I don’t think he’ll be left jobless for long – I guess he just burned out after having been a student for so long. Not 100% sure on his reasons – he just decided law wasn’t for him.
And yet the more I see people leave, the more convinced I am that the law IS for me, mediocre grades notwithstanding. I like the digging through old bound journals, knowing that if I don’t do a decent job, the intern at the opposing law firm will find a case that blows ours to smithereens. I like the intellectual exercise even though I am still shite at it. Above all, I like how honest the profession is (yes, snicker all you want). We’re not shy about gunning for the best-paying jobs or about the fact that some parts of the profession are bullshit, but it’s bullshit we all have to collude upon in order to keep the system running, because sometimes it feels as though we are the last bastion of order in a world collapsing from entropy.
Our networking session with the mentors last Friday helped to cement this view. Sure I’m not going to rise to the top of the judiciary without a First Class honours degree and a sharp legal mind, but I can be good enough to make a better living than I would have had at TLL, even accounting for opportunity costs. And most of all, I will no longer have to excuse myself for merely being a “tuition teacher”, because I realise now that was my subconscious shame at taking the easy way out in life. Lawyering is SOOOOO not the easy way out.
Getting used to law school is like going through JC all over again.
When I arrived in 2002 to do my A-Levels in Victoria Junior College, I had no friends from the same school, unlike the majority of my classmates. My weird uniform singled me out, and I didn’t understand the lingo.
Now, 13 years later, I have no classmates whom I know from JC or NS, unlike my freshman classmates. I just look older than the undergrads – I’ve been recognised off-campus by people I don’t know at all. It’s like a strange sort of unwanted celebrity.
And just like in JC, I’m struggling with the material. I got used to seeing Cs and Ds on my report card all throughout JC, even though they eventually translated into stellar exam grades at the finals. I don’t think I can fall back on that now – there isn’t a larger cohort out there to boost the curve, we are the entire population and it’s a shark tank. It’s not even the competitiveness I’m worried about – I objectively do not get the material. You could remove the top half of the cohort and I’d still be getting shit grades because WHAT IS LEGAL ANALYSIS?
Also, as previously stated, I have been slacking off and I am trying to remedy that (though I’ll be the first to admit I’m not exactly throwing myself at the work). In JC I busied myself playing with the original Sims game – now the distractions are Diablo 3 and dance. I’m trying to pick up the pace and clear some backlog before recess week, when I hope to make an actual effort and clear the entire backlog before the second half of the semester begins.
bleaaaaghhh why do I always take the circuitous route blaaaargh.
They warned us we would be drowning. They did.
I’m just doing my best to keep paddling because I spent the first 3 weeks doing less than the bare minimum and now I have to catch up. It’s less of a time issue and more of a laziness issue, I admit. And it’s not even as though I’m completely overwhelmed by the work. Focus a bit harder, leave off the social media for longer, keep the gaming to weekends, and bring out the tablet so I can read cases and textbooks while commuting.
All the GLBs are just waiting for recess week so we can catch up on some sleep and all the backlog of readings and cases… and come up for air.
SMU’s email came on a Thursday morning as I lay in bed checking my phone. I immediately sent off an email to my parents and my colleagues.
Half an hour later, as I was getting ready for work, an SMS came in from NUS admissions saying my status had been updated. The link took me to student login where the magic words “you have been offered” sat above “Graduate Law Programme”.
Another hasty email to parents.
By the time I got to the office, they were full of congratulations. I had already submitted my notice earlier that week but they obviously had not got the news, because HR works in slow and mysterious ways…
The handover for my replacement will be a rushed affair but he will have others to guide him along so… I’m outta here!
Age 15: The boys you see now will pale in comparison to boys you will meet in a couple of years. Don’t bother.
Age 18: Wear your retainer. When your wisdom teeth erupt and make the retainer an impossible fit, go back to your orthodontist and ask for a new retainer. You have to protect your parents’ investment in your dentition.
Age 19: Don’t apply to study psychology. Put in a bit more elbow grease even though A-Levels are over, and apply to law school.
Age 23: Buy hospitalisation insurance. Buy as much coverage as you can afford. Your employers are decent people, but they are also businessmen and they don’t owe you anything beyond a salary.
Age 24: Don’t go around meeting strangers from the internet unless you’ve been talking to them for a while.
Age 27: Don’t buy a car. Your friend is a decent person but not the best decision-maker around.
Age 28: Someone who relentlessly pursues you is not a person you need to pursue. Let them do the chasing, they prefer things that way.
Age 30: none of the above matters. You’re still alive, you’re in law school, things have turned out all right. Look forward, not back.
The cats have taken to waking me up at 6am, which is uncomfortably close to my actual alarm time of 7am. I can’t go back to sleep in case I oversleep and miss a lecture (or worse, a tutorial). I’ve been tanking all week but it’s Saturday now.
So what do I do instead of sleeping in? I sign up to spectate moots. In Chinatown. At 9 in the morning.
I kept yawning throughout the mock trial while fidgeting uncomfortably on the hard plastic chair. It took a lot of brainpower to keep up with the arguments without any visual aids.
After court adjourned for the judges to deliberate, I left to take the bus home. At least it was a direct bus, thank goodness for small mercies.
From here on out, I’m only signing my Saturdays away if I stand to benefit significantly.
Tuesday and already there’s notes in my mailbox for contract law.
Went to the library but not to study – was obtaining readings because I couldn’t secure any 2ndhand textbooks. Given the cost of books, I might just borrow all the way.
Wednesday and I’m rushing readings while eating leftover pizza because the queues at The Summit are too long and my time is too precious.
Thursday and I screw up by being slightly late for tutorial as well as giving the wrong definition of “verdict”. The answer was actually in my readings but I hadn’t got that far.
We find the rest of our GLB cohort and all 10 of us have now been added to the group.
Popped over to UTown with other students to explore student life options and we were all late for the Contract Law lecture, which may have prompted a response from the no-nonsense lecturer. She told off a couple of students for talking, so I will have to watch my motormouth.
As advice, she told us that everyone has Impostor Syndrome in the first few weeks. I probably feel it more than most, since I only got offered a place on my second try. I was so anxious that they might have made a mistake selecting me over some other candidate. I’m never going to believe that I was better than someone who was shortlisted with me – if there was the space I’m sure they would have loved to take all 800 shortlisted candidates. So I can’t let my status go to my head cos now everyone is just as good as I am.
There, I’ve said it.
Top Gear puts a silly smile on my face but the reality of car ownership in Singapore is far less pleasant.
With my limited budget, I could only afford a 20-year-old Mazda MX-5 which needed extensive repairs. Furthermore, I was a vainpot with more money than sense (and I had very little money) so I changed the colour of the car, and its upholstery, which wasn’t strictly necessary.
The total cost of the car + interest on the loan was $41k. I got back $16k from selling the car, so that’s $25k gone. Add in road tax, insurance, and all the repairs and upholstery, and we’re looking at a total of $40k, easy.
That $40k would have covered 3 years of rent while I was in school. To say I regret it might be an understatement.
I did love taking the car out for drives. I didn’t enjoy maintenance and I certainly felt stupid paying for a car I rarely used, but at the time that I bought it, I didn’t anticipate going back to school. Hindsight is 20/20 but it doesn’t take away the fact that I was impulsive and took bad advice from an enabler.
Add to that the fact that I spent my Sundays giving tuition just to cover the cost of ownership, and it becomes increasingly clear that I couldn’t REALLY afford a car. There’s so much more involved than just the monthly instalments, and I personally am not the type to drive when I’m feeling lazy and can take an Uber instead.
All the same, am I looking forward to getting an ND? Oh yes, but that can wait till I’m nearing 40.
Lynn Chan 