Student Comment Bitching

Benefits of student comment:

1. only opportunity most of us have to get published at this point in our lives - degree of publication's benefit to resume is questionable

2. fulfills seminar requirement at our school - virtually meaningless for reasons explained below

Costs of student comment:

1. huge time investment

2. huge stress investment

3. kills the joy of studying/writing about an interesting topic

4. fulfills the seminar requirement - I counted this as a benefit as well, but seminars are essentially guaranteed A's, meaning that not taking one has a good chance of lowering your potential GPA. Think of it as an opportunity cost sort of idea. Students can still take a seminar, but doing that eliminates all the utility of having the student comment fulfill the requirement. It just doesn't strike me that removing the need to take a guaranteed A class is all that helpful. Perhaps I should have created a "neutral/meaningless benefits" category.

I'm not even that bitter about having to write this comment for some reason. I think it's largely useless unless it is selected for publication and probably useless even then. We've all seen how much putting law review on our resumes helped (zero). I'm at 2400/3500 words for the initial draft, and I just don't want to do it anymore. It hasn't even been that difficult so far, as I'm essentially going to turn in a 3500 word case discussion. This entire post reminds me of whining about something I have no good reason to not do, perhaps along the lines of the "but...but...I don't WANNA" argument. Blah.

Someone please make my comment finish writing itself so I can stop whining about it.