I have finally completed one semester and now are mid-way into my second term of law school. It has been awhile since posting here (almost a year – yikes) but there is something critical that I have noticed and continue to witness even into law school. This is what I am coining as educational stagnation, or in other words, the thought that “school” or “education” is enough. We as students allow ourselves to believe that it’s all we need to do is get good grades, smile, and the opportunities will come our way. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Since starting law school and during my gap year I started to notice a lot of my classmates and peers struggling to get jobs or internships; especially anything remotely within their educational field. Why is this? This is because throughout their undergrad, the idea of educational stagnation was at the forefront of their minds. Students would only do internships because they had to get credit, or they were hoping for a job their senior year so they saw the internship as a medium to get a job. Sadly, this doesn’t lead to a success narrative but instead a struggle narrative.

This has further been substantiated by my experiences in law school. I have sat through law classes where we have been taught how to cut food (no joke! – I had to cut food on a plate and show where my knife and fork went) or talked about how to squeeze a lime into a cocktail. We even have spent an entire class on how to network! Now why do we need to talk about this in a course which is costing over $200 per hour to just sit in? It is because of educational stagnation. It isn’t the faculty’s fault, of whom was in the position to which they believed that they needed to conduct such teaching, it was because the students that were in the class had not been exposed to it.

What this simply means is that the bar has been set. Students have a lot of area to excel, to show their stuff, and most importantly to show themselves above the crowd. We as students need to get involved on day one! Grades are important, but it is a fallacy to think that they are the only thing that matters. Practice within a student’s ideal profession, makes them better professionals, better employees, and allows them to build a network to eventually fall onto when graduation hits. In fact, the trend of entrepreneurship has flourished because of these kinds of realities. People who are willing to go out and take a risk on their own, are often rewarded for doing so and land on much better footing than people who do not.

The sad thing about our education system today is that this is not encouraged. The institutions that should be encouraging community engagement, scream good grades instead. In fact, specifically at law school, law students are limited as to the number of hours they can work and their schedules are structured in a way to make any kind of internship almost virtually impossible. By institutions allowing educational stagnation to occur, we prohibit students from attaining their dreams and more importantly getting exposure to many different fields (which is the whole point of education anyways!!). Why should this be the case? What does this do in the end? Frankly I don’t have the answer to these questions as a student myself. But I do know that instead, institutions across this country should be screaming industry engagement AND grades; both at the same level of importance.

So how do we fix this educational stagnation? Frankly, it starts from the grassroots efforts of individual students. So, students, get involved on day one of school. Work at non-profits who don’t have structured internships, go to meetups, get engaged in the networking opportunities around your local ecosystem. Grades truly aren’t the only thing that matters. Don’t let yourself get into educational stagnation, because when you do; you become the crowd, not the person above the crowd.