 Reflections On Baylor Law
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Oct. 21st, 2007 @ 05:20 pm 
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I arrived at Baylor Law in late January, 2005. Now, almost 3 years later I'm a little less than 3 weeks from graduation, which means its time to take stock of my experiences here. Looking back on it, I have no doubt that I have received a top-notch legal education. But if I had to do it all over again, would I make the same decision to come to Baylor? After some thought, as much as it pains me to say it, I've concluded that no, I would not come to Baylor if I had a do-over (Yes, I would still go to law school)
Before I get into the reasons why, I will give the experience its due and talk about some of the positive things to come out of this experience. First, I've made some fantastic friends here that I hope will remain close friends for the rest of my life. You can't ask for friends better than Tasha, Ashley (and their husbands Dan and Ryan) and Allison. I only hope the fact that I'll almost certainly end up in a different city from all of them won't cause us to drift apart and lose contact as seems to happen so often.
Secondly, I have had some fantastic professors and some truly amazing classes. The troika of practice court professors are as good as you can get. They are incredibly demanding, but rightly so because they take their duty very seriously--that is to produce lawyers who are competent to represent their clients and be able to stand up to more experienced lawyers on the day that we get our law license. These guys know all that there is to know, and I'm glad that I had the experience with them. Additionally, I came in to Baylor interested in Constitutional law but desperate to learn more, and I will lot leave disappointed. If you include my kindergarten years, I've been in school for over 20 years, and I've never had a teacher/professor that I've liked more than Prof. David Guinn.
Third, while Practice Court was definitely the worst 6 months of my life, I survived it and I KNOW that I will leave here better prepared and better trained than probably 99% of the graduates of other law schools in this country. While I have complaints about the program that I'll detail below, there is no questioning the results.
If you put aside the stuff about the friendships (because I'm not sure I really say that I'd ever be willing to give them up), If I were to go back in time to June 2004 and tell myself what to do, I'd tell myself not to come here. I know that I've already listed some of the really positive things to come out of my time here, I think the negatives will end up outweighing the good.
First, the City of Waco: I've been lucky thus far in my life. I grew up in Dallas, though not the greatest tourist city on earth, its a great place to live with all the things that I could personally want in a city. Then I went to Athens, Georgia. Athens is, without question, one of the two best college towns in America (Athens and Austin are 1a and 1b). Those of you that have been there don't need me to explain why it kicks so much ass. Plus, its close enough to Atlanta to get all the benefits of the big city that might otherwise be lacking in Athens. That proximity was a great thing because I am a city boy at heart. Waco, on the other hand, SUCKS. It is thoroughly uninteresting, with nothing but an interstate highway and nearly every chain restaurant known to man, plus its really ugly. I know for a fact that I would have been happier in any of the other cities that I was considering for law school).
But Waco's inherent suckiness is not the biggest problem with the town, its the location. Waco is not a big town, with only about 100,000 people, and it does not have a thriving legal community (despite the fact that we've got some really good professors). So going to school here, its damn near impossible to make the connections with lawyers from Dallas or Austin, those connections being really important to getting a job at the end of law school. Plus, given the location, while we do have on-campus interviews twice a year, our location keeps a lot of firms away, so the opportunity to get a job coming out of that process is extremely small.
Second, and perhaps the biggest problem, is that Baylor Law does a piss poor job of promoting itself, and blame for that has to lay squarely at the top (I'm looking in your direction, Dean Toben). Baylor is ranked somewhere near 55 in the U.S. News & World Reports rankings, but there is simply no excuse for us being that low given our astronomical bar passage rate and the skills that our graduates leave here with. With our ranking being lower than it is, the value of my degree suffers and makes it just that much harder to get a job. But the general ranking is not the biggest problem regarding publicity--it is the utter lack of knowledge about the Practice Court program in the legal community. Practice Court produces the best trained graduates in the state of Texas, and I'd put it up against any program in the country, but very few people seem to know about it or understand it. If a firm doesn't have a Baylor grad near the top of the hierarchy, the chances are they've probably never heard of Practice Court. And if the firm is outside of Texas, there is pretty much zero chance that they know anything about it. And its just not the type of thing that you can explain properly in a 20 minute interview or in a cover letter. What is the point of going through that hell if we can't take advantage of it when trying to get a job?!!! Given the lack of legal clinics at Baylor, PC is THE mechanism by which we show we have experience, but it apparently doesn't do us any good! I feel like I've put myself through this for nothing. This is not the fault of the professors, this is the fault of the administration.
The third big problem is grade deflation: Baylor actively tries to depress its grades. If you've got a 3.2 here, thats pretty much the same thing as getting a 3.65 at the University of Texas. They want the students to "earn" their grades, but they don't seem to realize what they are doing to our job prospects. Our grades here are so much lower than anywhere else in the region, and when you combine that with the lack of understanding about the Baylor program, that creates a BIG problem for us. When these law firms get our transcripts and my resume, and see that I'm in the top 25% of the class, they might actually consider me, but when they look and see that means I've got around a 3.2....that application is probably going straight to the trash pile. When I was making my decision to come here, if I had known that the school's policies would put me at such a disadvantage on the job market, I wouldn't have willingly put myself at that disadvantage. Because while all the training is great, in the end I still have to get a job, I'd have gone somewhere that I could be on a level playing field with everyone else.
The bottom line is that I think I am now at a disadvantage because I went to Baylor, when there is no excuse for not having an advantage because I went here. If I had the choice, I wouldn't do that to myself again.Current Mood:  frustrated |
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