After a few light days of waiting in lines and milling around assorted atriums and breezeways, law school orientation started for real on Monday with hour after hour of speeches and announcements. Most of the material covered was rather rote (sexual harassment is bad, you should know that Adlai Stevenson went here, etc.), but one speech stood out: the admissions speech.
At undergrad orientation, the Dean of Admissions regaled us with statistics on our high SAT scores and GPAs, then picked out the best overstatements from successful applicants for special praise. Everyone wants to hear that they go to school with someone who rode around the world on a donkey, translating local newspapers into braille for the blind people of the third world or some such.
But yesterday's admissions speech went above and beyond, turning an uplifting view of fellow classmates into an half-hour parade of shame for those of us who failed to get any patents, venture capital funding, battlefield experience or record contracts in between school and entry-level work.
We have a small class here, so the endless parade of readers-to-the-blind, camel racers, Antarctic researchers and award winners seemed to cover the entire class. I've met the Fulbright winner, the guy who worked in 13 countries and the camel racer, but some of them were new to me.
Like the guy who invented the world's smallest pistol.
The Dean of Admissions paused as the tech guy in the back queued up the James Bond theme. As if the fact that this guy has three patents and I don't even own a proper drill wasn't bad enough, the dean went on to detail the weight (12 oz.) size (about that of a credit card) and other facts about this really small firearm. For the rest of the day, everyone was abuzz about the tiny gun and who may have invented it.
After what seemed like hours, the dean finished his list of people who are better than me. In the last 24 hours, I've met a lot of them, but not Little Pistol Guy.
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