Graduating from law school did not feel like much. Just another item crossed off the to-do list. Most of my friends marked the occasion with family dinners, heartfelt speeches, and a lot of posing in gowns. I opted out. Not out of spite or sadness. I just didn’t feel the need to put on a show.
We graduated online, thanks to the last lingering coughs of COVID. When my name was called, I was not watching. Somewhere on a screen, in some virtual hall, someone probably clapped. I willl never know.
I did go through the motions, picked up my gown, posed for a few photos with friends, returned it, grabbed my transcripts and certificate, and that was that. Because honestly, in my mind, law school was not over yet. Not really. The real beast was still waiting. The Kenya School of Law. If you know, you know.
We had two weeks to apply, find a place in Nairobi, and mentally prepare to enter the KSL vortex. I barely had time to blink, let alone reflect. I was working during that period too, so everything felt rushed and slightly irrelevant.
Looking back, those four years at university zipped by. First year I was a bit of a mess, no clue how to study, no idea how to revise, drowning in readings and trying to figure out whether “examinable” was a thing you could know. By fourth year, I could tell which pages mattered before I even opened the textbook. The learning curve was steep, but the view from the top was decent.
Some units stuck. Intellectual Property? Brilliant. Loved every minute. Wrote my dissertation on it and did not regret a single citation [In fact, I should write something on this soon, oooh to be passionate about something] Others? Pure suffering. Public International Law was a weekly endurance test. The kind of class that makes you stare at the clock and reconsider your life choices.
Second year, first semester was the toughest stretch. Eight units. All legal. All at once. That was the point I realised the degree wasn’t going to hand itself over just because I liked the idea of being a lawyer. It wanted blood. But by fourth year, things clicked. The panic had simmered down. I could read less, retain more, and spot what the examiner was fishing for from a mile off. Exams stopped feeling like war.
Do I wish I had had a better game plan from the start? Sure. Could I have taken better photos at graduation? Definitely. It would been nice to have something decent to look back on instead of a blurry phone shot with one eye closed and a gown that did not quite fit. But here is the truth. No one really tells you how to do law school. You just stumble into it, survive the chaos, and come out the other side a bit more cynical and a bit more capable.
That was graduation for me. Just a quiet, solid step forward. And maybe that is all it ever needed to be.
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