American Idol's Will Hopkins (WSJ Law Blog) 

Law student: No, I have plenty of uninteresting things to read. 

Crap Brackets 

Or not.  He did ask him about Bore v. Gush and got the same answer that made headlines a few weeks later.  

Then he blogged about it. 

HuffPost Blogger Scoops 60 Minutes (HuffPost, with audio from interview) 

Lest the previous list of the top five things better at Darden has actually got you taking practice GMATs in your kitchen, it seems only fair to shine some light on why so many smart and talented people would forego free coffee for Examples & Explanations. I therefore present for your approval: the top ten things better at the law school.

We have girls! And they didn't need special treatment to get in! Darden struggles to get to 30 percent female, while UVA law is one the low end at 40+ percent. A hilarious consequence, of course, are the scores Darden guys hitting on law school girls with awesome lines about hedge funds and car service. You can’t put a price on that.

Everyone speaks English

This might not seem like a big deal, but there are seriously people at Darden whose English is bad enough that they cannot be understood in class. Besides being annoying, it’s a waste of my tuition money when they insist on participating (someone did the math my first year and Darden apparently costs around $8/minute). As a foreign citizen myself, I'm not a xenophobe about this, I'm just saying: one language = efficiency.

Internet in class

Good lord, can you imagine class without internet? What’s next, starting fire with sticks? Various law schools have tried unplugging their classrooms with little success. At Darden, in order to encourage participation, the internet is turned off in the classrooms. This is especially awful during recruiting season or during a fantasy draft, but maybe the worst collateral effect is that the system ends up requiring a hard line connection to get online at school during the day. Long live the Cavalier wireless connection!

No participation grades

One of the reasons there isn't internet allowed in class at Darden is that classroom discussion is so incredibly retarded that nobody would pay any attention if the internet were available. Because grades are tied to classroom participation and professors largely don't monitor for quality, students at Darden will just say just about anything during class. At the law school, we get around this by not saying anything at all. The silence may frustrate law school professors, but they should take my word for it that they'd rather have us quiet than bombing class with dumb comments like “I know that’s the right answer because I saw it on the internet somewhere” or “To keep flies out of the product, you should first close the doors to the factory” (real quotes, by the way).

Rankings

UVA Law has been able to fend off a rankings dive, unlike Darden. To be fair, Darden places much better than its ranking and is able to be a top 15 school with almost no professor research that is respected by peers, which is like a quarter of the b-school rankings formulas last time I checked. That's an incredible feat, proving how great Darden is in every other way. But still, it's emotionally crippling to watch your MBA degree become increasingly less marketable before your eyes, year after year. We'd all like to see UVA Law move up in rankings, but let's all count our blessings that we haven't seen it fall.

22-year-olds

The average age of Darden students is somewhere around 28. A good portion of students are married (at least at matriculation). At the law school, something like half the students have never been out in the real world before. They bring a certain je ne sais quoi to the whole experience. The naïveté, the blind enthusiasm, the total incomprehension of how much money $160,000 is—it makes me feel young again. They’re like the little sisters and brothers you never had. You just want to buy them a bottle of Boone’s Farm for the prom limo of life and watch them go off into the night of bad decisions and emotional scarring that is the working world.

Libel show

I'm not a Libel Show groupie or anything, and I'm not part of the production, but I have to say that those folks put on quite a show. Especially compared to the Darden Follies. The past two years of Darden Follies have been embarrassing. Not only were the Follies not funny, but there were enough production SNAFUs that the show never even finished (big things are expected this year, though). Meanwhile, at the law school, Supreme Court justices are telling us where the exits are, all those band geek kids from high school are now in law school blasting sick trombones, and the coordinated dance numbers somehow manage a minimum of cringeworthiness. One of the highlights of the law school experience. (Though I still want to know where the $19 per ticket in revenues goes.)

Beer and softball

Softball is sort of passe now that baseball has been crushed by the NFL and NASCAR in terms of popularity. Still, it remains notable that the law school has stuck to its guns on old school fun culture. The business school equivalent to beer-and-softball is probably something like cocaine-and-special-purpose-entities. Instead, Darden has sold out and gone more in the kumbaya direction, with "leadership" measured in numbered levels and the excellence of its program measured in how many cases can be written about India and China. A toast to the law school for its cultural honesty.

Real credits

At Darden, there is a course where you watch movies for homework and then talk about them in class. There is another course where the professor shows clips from James Bond movies, you talk about brands, and finish by writing a six-page double spaced paper (no research required). There are three courses where you just read nonfiction books and chat about them once a week. There are courses with no homework; all they consist of are speakers who come to class to talk to you during each session. There is a class where you perform a play and another class where you read 9th grade English-level fiction and discuss them over dinner. All of these classes give you the same credits as Derivatives, M&A, or Data Analysis and Optimization. The truth is that some of those bullshit courses end up being the most interesting classes at the school, but that doesn't change the fact that they're a total joke in terms of work. With a very few exceptions, even the hardest business school courses don't really come close to the easiest law school courses. So hold your head up high; you're taking the more difficult road to a less lucrative future, but you're probably building some kind of moral character that will pay off in the long run.

A third year

That's right, you heard me. The third year of law school is a good thing, especially in Charlottesville. I know it sucks to take on more debt, but life is short, and the next time you'll be able to go golfing on a Tuesday morning, play softball on a Thursday afternoon, and drink five nights a week is called retirement (though you might be drinking Metamucil). When recent Darden grads come back for recruiting, they immediately miss the place, and rightfully so. Law school gives us 50 percent more time with which to enjoy life and invest in ourselves than does business school, and we should be thankful for that.

So we're sticking around.  Mostly for the girls, but probably because we're naive. 

Huseby/Hitsky vs. Halbert/Theiss 

A little back-story:

Huseby and Hitsky looked to be a formidable contender in this year's Pong for Pila tournament.  But in the second round they ran up against darkhorses Halbert and Theiss.  After an extremely competitive first game, won by Halbert/Theiss in overtime, Huseby/Hitsky fell apart and were smoked in game 2.  Halbert and Theiss then celebrated by smoking victory cigars--prompting Huseby to comment, "I wish it was more socially acceptable to get into fights." 

Halbert and Theiss went on to win Pong for Pila.  They now seek to complete an unprecedented double, and assert their party-game dominance by holding both the Beer Pong and Cornhole crowns at the same time.  The only thing standing in their way is a Huseby/Hitsky team bent on revenge . . .

The weather on Thursday should be beautiful, and the Commish will be asking the SBA officers to get the keg out there nice and early.  Come on out, grab a beer and a seat on the grassy knoll, forget about finals for a while, and watch some championship-level cornhole . . .

Thanks to everyone for playing this spring...hopefully next year's HRSP group will be as enthusiastic about this sport as I am, and we can renew the competition in the fall . . .

 

Sincerely,

The Commish

 

HRSP Spring Cornhole Tournament Championship

Thursday, April 24, 2008, 3:30PM

Spies Garden

Huseby/Hitsky vs. Halbert/Theiss   

Beer, cornhole and socially acceptable fighting.  What more could you want? 

So it's exam time, and maybe you're staying late the libs, the fishbowl, or just rocking the books at home. Do you ever have a moment where you think you hear laughing? Yeah, laughing. Or, like, the sing-song sounds of spring? The playful twitter of youth let loose to frolic in the sun?

Well I'm here to tell you that you're not hallucinating. Those sounds are coming from Darden, where exams are basically a joke. Even though first-years take five, four- to six-hour exams in five straight days, most students just punch them out in two hours and go golfing. Exams are like pre-vacation vacation. As long as your notes spreadsheet is good to go, you can't get worse than a B (the mean grade at Darden). There's a saying for the hard courses: "Draw a [decision] tree, get a B."

But you know what? Darden's awesome exams didn't even make the top five things that are better at Darden.  Click on to read my list in case exams have you reconsidering this whole "law" thing.

Darden actually has a grade non-disclosure policy so that recruiters have to directly ask you for your grades; the school won't provide a transcript. And with the exception of some investment banks or consulting companies, recruiters rarely ask for grades. You get your job offers with your resume and your interviewing skills, which are already probably in good shape if you got in to Darden to begin with. Plus, networking trumps grades any day of the week and twice on Sunday. If you go to all of a firm's events, call their people, shake their hands, and know a little about how to build a DCF model, you're locked into a sweet banking job. And get this: a third to a half of your grade comes from class participation, so if you don't know something, just ask a lot of questions about it and rack up the participation points. In sum, Darden is all about learning, but not about keeping score. What a pleasant concept.

Free coffee, 24/7

That's right people, free coffee. In the mornings, there are fresh kettles of all the Starbucks coffee you can drink. In the evenings, you can hit up a machine in one of the TV lounges that will get you your fix. Okay, fine, the cost of coffee comes out of tuition, but it FEELS free.

Administrators who care

I mean this in specifically two ways: the registrar's office and the career services office. The Darden registrar's office is one of the most competent, communicative, helpful, and flexible administrative teams I have ever encountered. You know how Dean Bennett is all about the "No"? To EVERYTHING? Well, the Darden registrar is all about finding solutions. Want to add a special course? Sure. Want to add/drop late as long as it doesn't affect somebody else? Done. But the biggest thing about the Darden registrar's office is their course registration system. Instead of our delightful LawReg system, they give every student 3,000 points with which to bid on courses, so whoever wants something the most gets it. It's the fastest, simplest, fairest, and most efficient system. And it sure as hell works; you hardly ever hear a complaint about registration. The add/drop period is smooth, with the Darden home page facilitating trades among students. It's like a course registration nirvana.

Instead of a career center that pisses off recruiters and students at every turn, misleads students about key information, screws up resumes, and gives students inaccurate information about legal markets, Darden's career office, while not perfect, at least acts as though it wants to help everyone get a job. If you don't have something locked up by a certain date, they'll follow up with you and see if there's anything they can do to help. They built a hotel on campus to make things easier for recruiters (seriously). Every first year goes through a series of career workshops to get their resumes and interviewing skills in top shape. The result? Top jobs, less stress.

Tech service

Derek Leach and Lady Derek are great. They are. But they still just don't have anything on the computer guys at Darden. Darden has a desk in the center of the school with at least two people there to help at all times. They fix and replace parts faster than it takes to get a Big Mac at the Barrack's McDonald's. I've had a screen, keyboard, motherboard, power cable, and hard drive all fail on my Dell. Replacements all free and done within 24 hours, plus I get a loaner with my own hard drive in it while I'm waiting for the new part. One of my buddy's hard drives was dying, and the tech guys even managed to save his porn. Now that's service.

Parking

Last, but certainly not least, Darden's got a fucking parking garage. It's got tons of spaces. Four or five levels. It's red brick with white columns and fake shuttered windows. It's so pretty that when I first visited Darden, I thought it was another classroom building. It sometimes goes by the name Garage Mahal, but don't let its looks fool you. The garage is right next to the classroom buildings, it's kept clean, safe, and well-lit, and it doesn't cost much more than an outdoor spot at the law school that's a 15 minute walk from SL298.

Don't worry law schoolers, he'll be back tomorrow with all the reasons you're better off at the law school. 

That's what we're thinking as we browsed Above the Law's recent survey on associate debt.  It's truly scary to think that 10 percent of the class of 2000 still has more than 100k in student debt.  It's also worrisome that not even half of that class are debt free.  So, go freak yourself out. 

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