Feeling Grateful

(or "How I Learned to Stop Bitching (so much) About Law School")

A friend just emailed me this story from the New York Times about "Education City" in Qatar. Five American universities have brought their programs and professors to the Middle East, and apparently more are on the way. So far Education City consists of Cornell’s medical school, Virginia Commonwealth University's art and design program, Carnegie Mellon's computer and business programs, Texas A&M's engineering program (petroleum engineer being the largest),; and Georgetown's foreign service school. Northwestern University's journalism program will be added soon. The programs at Education City are not just "affiliated with" with their American universities, they are an actual branch of the school in the Middle East. Professors have moved down to Qatar and the classes are mostly the same. It's become the Ivy League of the region with students enrolling in whichever school they get into, even though different programs will necessitate a complete change in career plans.

It's a great article, and you should go read all of it, but what struck me the most was a section on the second page titled "Opportunities for Women." To quote some of the article: "Education City represents broad opportunities for women, in a nation where many families do not allow their daughters to travel overseas for higher education or to mix casually with men. Cornell stresses, proudly, that it was Qatar’s first coeducational institution of higher learning. The female students are very much aware of their new opportunities... 'I don’t want my father’s money or my husband’s money,' said Maryam al-Ibrahim, a 21-year-old second-year student at Virginia Commonwealth. 'I want to work for a private company and be myself, and I would like to become someone important here.' Mais Taha, a Texas A&M petroleum-engineering student, glows as she talks about her classes, including Reservoir Fluids — hydrocarbons, she explains sweetly — and Drilling."

I may not ever "glow" while talking about constitutional law, but I am grateful for the opportunity to attend law school - and much more than that, I'm grateful that it doesn't often occur to me to be grateful. I may worry about pursuing partnership track as a lawyer with children, but growing up it never occurred to me that I couldn't have the same educational aspirations as the boys in my elementary school class. Lawyer, doctor, and scientist were all realistic answers for the "what do you want to be when you grow up?" question. I'm lucky that when I decided, halfway through my junior year in college, that I felt like going to law school, the only thing standing in my way was the LSAT. I'm going to try to keep that in mind as I slog my way through the 100+ pages I'm behind in con law.