During my senior year of college, TiVo was a godsend. For that one glorious year, the one thing I was never short on was time. After managing to get into law school, I subsequently developed a full-on case of senioritis, which should have provided plenty of time for pursuing anything I wanted: lifelong dreams, childhood hobbies that had since fallen by the wayside, all the great books I had never read. Instead, I chose to take this time and spend it watching TV--the more mindless, the better.
Aiding me in this endeavor was TiVo. Although I had the time to catch most of my favorite shows during their original airings, TiVo filled in the blanks quite nicely. I could watch The Daily Show for three nights a week, but when it was Thursday and time to go out, I would set that night's episode to record. It was magnificent.
When I got to law school, I thought my trusty DVR would prove its worth more than it ever had before. For one, the law school schedule is much more hectic and unpredictable than anything I experienced in college. There’s always such-and-such student group meeting, or some speaker stopping by, or some free dinner somewhere, or just a heap of reading due the next day. I knew I wouldn’t have time to sit down and watch TV whenever I wanted.
Thus, I turned again to TiVo. In college, I had practiced restraint. In law school, I went overboard. When you’re chronically short on time and you have a magic box that puts the entire world of television at your beck and call, it’s hard to resist the temptation. Every morning, I would look through the day’s programming schedule, and then set TiVo to record anything remotely interesting. Oh, there’s an Office marathon on TBS? I’ll record every episode! Oh, today’s Sunday? I'll record every NFL game on TV! (and then Sportscenter afterward, so I can catch all the highlights and analysis.)
Of course, it never quite worked out that way. Mere weeks into law school, my TiVo became a huge backlog of all sorts of programming that I never really sat down to watch. But dammit, it felt good to have the ability to watch all those shows, should the mood ever strike (hint: it never did.) I guess I'm just lucky my roommate doesn't watch TV. It would be a disaster.
After researching this phenomenon further, it appears I’m not alone. This condition actually has a name: TiVo guilt. Go figure. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go record that episode of Lost that's airing tomorrow night.
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Hey, cool blog. I'm a Columbia undergrad right now who's thinking about law school, but I'm not sure if Columbia law would be right for me. As an undergrad one must run through a gauntlet of requirements, of varying degrees of annoying-ness. I'm wondering about Columbia law requirements--could you tell me something about the trial competition? I don't know much about it and, perhaps for that reason, am intimidated at the thought of it.
ReplyDeleteHey William, good to hear from you. I think you're probably thinking about moot court, which you can find more about here:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.law.columbia.edu/llm_jsd/grad_studies/courses/moot_court
Every first-year student has to fulfill the moot court requirement, and I'm in the middle of it right now. I can write a blog elaborating on it if you want. It's a bit of work, but it's really not that bad, and it definitely shouldn't be something that you should be intimidated by.
There are some other requirements (a writing credit and 40 hours of pro bono work come to mind) but it's not all that much. During your second and third years, you can take whatever courses you like, and you can even cross-register for a certain amount of credits with other graduate schools like SIPA. There's definitely nothing approaching the rigidity of the undergrad core curriculum at Columbia.
Ah, cool. I'd love to read about moot court if you're willing to blog about it. I do know about cross-registration, which is a cool idea. There was a 3L in my French class. Incidentally, a douche--hopefully not representative of law students in general!
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