Welcome to Law School 2L: Sweet Smell of Success

This is the one you've been waiting for. After all the frustration and disappointment of my summer job search, I can proudly say that finally, I have a job. An excellent position that I am proud to hold and am looking forward to beginning.

This summer I'll be working as a research assistant for an incredibly intelligent, well-respected professor at my law school. I had him as a professor last year and was truly impressed by how thoroughly he knew the intricacies of a complex subject, how approachable and accessible he was to students and mostly, how much he genuinely cared about teaching. When he offered me the opportunity to work with him this summer, I accepted gladly.

My summer will primarily be spent researching for several projects my professor has been working on, including an update of his casebook, a new book on Federalism and a few law review articles. I'm lucky I paid attention in Legal Research class! I think the work I'll be doing will be engaging and educational as well as being a positive addition to my resume. Frankly, the only drawback of this position is that I am staying in Los Angeles for the summer. As much as I've grown to like LA, I will miss my family and friends on the East coast and especially the familiar sticky humidity of a New York City summer.

As stressor after stressor has disappeared, my spring has been one of a slow deceleration. My mounting job-search anxiety was ameliorated. I took a week and a half for Spring Break in Central Europe, during which I did not so much as think about law school. The week after break, I turned in my law journal note an albatross of a project that had been hanging around my neck since early fall semester. [For those of you who are not familiar with the law note, it is a legal dissertation of sorts the mother of all research papers.]

I think my peers and I are all coasting a bit now. We're not all skipping class and eschewing our readings, but we're approaching school with a bit less frantic diligence. Even the first-years have relaxed their white-knuckled grip on the library-carrel desktops.

The calm before the storm. As much as we have relaxed, slacked-off or otherwise chilled out, we all know what's coming. Soon all the library study rooms will have waiting lists. Soon people will stop going out on Friday nights. Soon the steps outside the law school will be full of chain-smoking students. Soon there will be large silent rooms charged with the electricity of 100 brains moving at lightning speed, 100 pencils hissing along the bluebook pages, 100 laptop keyboards tapping like rain on a tin roof.

And then, suddenly, we're two-thirds of the way through this adventure.

Annika K Martin is a second-year law student at the University of Southern California Law School in Los Angeles, Calif. She earned her undergraduate degree from Northwestern University. She likes Swedish furniture, German cars, French films and Indian food.