Done

I am done with school...not done in the sense that I have finished (I still have one more semester, done for good in May), but done in the sense that I have had enough. I don't feel like I learned nearly as much this semester as I did during the first year, and in fact found a lot of the stuff to be kind of repetitive (or overly theoretical).

And to be really honest, there are a lot of my classmates that are kind of annoying. There are also some that I like dearly, but there are entirely too many who have always been the smartest person in their class, and need to be constantly validated. And that gets old...the whole point of doing group projects is to get used to sharing workloads and sharing credit. If you can't trust someone else to do something, and you need to be patted on the back for every good thing you do, then you make for a pain-in-the-ass group member.

I am also a little sick of people asking me for a job. I was sort of warned that this would be a problem, but it is still annoying. I work in an industry and for a firm that a large portion of my classmates would like to work in/for, and that can be very hard to break into. Ergo, once work sort of got around, I found that I was an extremely popular girl with people who want some sort of an in. And I don't blame anyone...they are completely right to aggressively try and make as many contacts as they can.

But it has gotten old: I have had probably 50 people ask me if I could set up a breakfast or lunch meeting with one of the partners at the firm for them. There have been exactly 3 people that I have done that for (and no, they are not my friends, they are the people that I think the partners would want to meet). In fact, only two of them were with partners in the firm I work for...the other was actually with another firm that fit that guy's background better (more high-tech industries than what we do most of our work in). I also feel bad making those people swear up and down to not tell anyone that I did that for them, lest people get irritated when I tell them there are no openings.

Honestly, the job situation is beginning to wear on people. Most of my classmates assumed that there would be a healthy array of really attractive options for them when we all graduated. The actual situation is obviously bleaker than that. I am extremely fortunate to not be looking for a job, and I am not one bit envious of those that are. As graduation approaches, the pressure is not going to ease up at all.

Which isn't to say that any of us need much sympathy...no one that I go to school with is going to have any trouble landing on his or her feet. However, a whole lot of them came here expecting to go to Wall Street and earn $200,000 their first year back to work, and many of them will be sorely disappointed. We at least take solace in knowing that it is probably even worse for the people in the law school, who have twice as much debt and even bleaker job prospects (but really, no one has any sympathy for lawyers).

So, I think all of that...the overall stress, some annoying personalities, some disappointment in the curriculum...is sort of combining to make it a bit tedious these days. Really, I am just ready to be through with it and back at work full time. I dunno...maybe some new classes after the New Year will make me feel better about it. We shall see;-)