Congratulations! You’ve been accepted!
What I like to call: “being in limbo” while waiting to hear back from law schools can be a very stressful, anxious, and gut-wrenching experience for many. “Being in limbo” is the uneasy feeling you have when you are unsure what to do with your life while waiting to find out if you have been accepted to law school. I was among the many that went through that experience. My “limbo” consisted of me going to work every day at a job that I knew would never amount to a career. From the time I submitted my applications in October of 2018, I would nervously refresh my emails on an hourly basis and check my applicant accounts on school websites, in hopes that I would find the word “accepted” on one of these pages at some point in time.
As time went on from the application submission date, I began checking Lawstudents.ca/forums as many other hopeful law students do, to see what other people who had been accepted into various program scored on the LSAT and what their GPA’s were. Scrolling through these forum pages were interesting at first, but as time went on and I had still heard nothing back from any school. As I saw TONS of other people being accepted, I started to get nervous.
Then things changed, the nerves turned into disappointment and self-doubt as the rejections started rolling in. The more rejections I received the more time I spent on those forums, but now it was for a different reason. I was in such a bad place mentally after receiving multiple rejections that I would go on to the forums just to make myself feel worse. I’d scroll through every school’s “Accepted 2019–20” page and read posts like: “Hey guys, SO relieved I just received my acceptance letter!!!!! GPA: 3.9 LSAT:168”. At first, I was jealous of these people, I mean wow that’s an unreal GPA and amazing LSAT score. But then, like I said I just used these posts to fuel my insecurities. I made myself feel like I was inadequate and certainly not capable of being a law student.
Moving further in time, I honestly started accepting the fact that maybe law wasn’t meant to be and I should start looking for other career options. So, I consulted my friends and family who were all weary to help because they knew how long I had wanted to get into law school. But, with some convincing, I was able to get some insight into other industries like finance, accounting, real estate, development, and construction management, or maybe going to do an MBA? I spent months trying to decide what my back up would be if this whole law school thing, that I had only spent pretty much half my life hoping for, didn’t work out…cool.
Trekking along further into 2019, I was working every day at the event rentals company and as a side hustle started importing emergency disposable phone chargers from China and selling them to stores across Ontario. I was slowly coming to terms with the potential disappointment and rejection from law school which was beginning to become a reality.
Then came May of 2019. My friends and I had planned our first boys trip to Mexico so that had me distracted and excited for a while as I went through what I still felt was life “in limbo”. The day before we were leaving for our trip I had a crazy busy day at work prepping to be gone for a week and ended up staying at the office until my men’s league basketball game at around 9 PM. After the game (Which we won, thanks for asking), I drove home, had some dinner and was spending time with my family.
This already subconsciously felt sort of weird, my family is almost never all together. My parents always work crazy hours and are almost on completely different schedules and my sister is in high school and practically lives in her room on facetime with friends. So, this was weird! Everyone just so happened to be spending time together at around 11 p.m. on a weeknight? But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t really phased by it at the time. I mean, I had a long day of work, a basketball game and still needed to pack for a flight that was taking off at 6 a.m. the next day.
Oddly enough as I sat there with my family watching a west coast playoff basketball game, I realized I hadn’t checked my emails today! Which at this point in the admissions process was rare for me. I pulled up my emails on my phone, refreshed the page and saw an email from the University of Windsor.
At this point in time, I was numb to these emails and expected it to be another “thanks but no thanks” rejection emails telling me to try again next year. However, this one was different. I opened the email, read the words “congratulations!” and almost had a heart attack. That is the moment I found out I was accepted to the Dual JD program and boy, was I excited. I can honestly say that my initial reaction was just shock then after a few seconds I screamed at the top of my lungs: “I GOT ACCEPTED TO $#%*$ING LAW SCHOOL” and in the rare occurrence that my family was all together, we went nuts. I was jumping around the house at 11:30 p.m. with a sense of relief like I had never felt before.
After about a 15-minute freak out with a few tears of relief shed, I called my girlfriend, who then started crying and made me cry again (but happy tears so it's ok) and then I called my grandmother who was one of my biggest supporters through the ups and downs to tell her the good news. It was especially important for me to share this moment with my grandmother because my uncle, who passed away in his early 30’s to Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, was an alumnus of the Windsor Law program. So, for her and my dad, this moment meant a lot more than just a law school acceptance and I am grateful that I am able to give them the joy of having another Delmar pick up the lawyer torch that my uncle left waiting for me before his untimely passing.
My life had turned around in an instant. A few words I read on my phone that night changed my trajectory and gave me a feeling of self-worth and confidence I hadn’t felt in years. To me, my acceptance meant a lot more than a new career path, it was a definition of my abilities to push myself to achieve my goals. The process can be extremely grueling but the end goal is beyond worth it. A legal education is irreplaceable and is a privilege that I cherish every day.
The lesson I took away from this was simple, if you want it, go get it.
