Q&A with Huma Rashid: Part I

Law school can be awful. The workload. The pressure. The stress. It’s not always an easy path. However, the study of law does have some redeeming qualities. For me, the best part is the people I have gotten the chance to interact with through this journey. One of those is Huma Rashid, a wise-cracking, whip-smart law student living and studying in Chicago. Her blog, The Reasonably Prudent Law Student, never fails to amuse. (I highly recommending reading through her archives.) After I mentioned her blog back in September, we started talking through the Interwebz and I became obsessed. Yes, that’s right. I became a fangirl. Every night after class, I would comb through her Twitter and laugh out loud at her astute observations. So I begged her to share some of her wisdom with us poor first-year students. I begged and I pleaded and after she finished her final exam, Huma answered all of my nagging questions. Enjoy.

Q&A with Huma Rashid: Part II

In Part I, Huma Rashid, a a second-year law student at John Marshall Law School in Chicago, IL tells us why she went to law school and what she wants to do with it. In Part II, Huma shares her tips for 1Ls and tell us how she does it all.

How do you balance blogging/studying? I blog sometimes on the train, if the LawSchoolBFF isn’t taking the train home with me. I usually blog as a study break. It doesn’t take me very long to put together a post; an average BCS post, for example, takes 20 minutes to put together with all the writing, scouting out clothes, image editing, and linking. A more serious post about actual legal topics takes about 10-15 minutes to put together. Basically, I carve out little pockets of time during the day to blog because I’d go crazy if I didn’t. This is just a way to get my inner crazy out so I don’t run around setting things on fire.

Did you blog as a 1L? Yes. I started in the middle of my 1L year, I think.

Are you ever afraid future employers are going to Google your name and read through your posts? Yes and no. I’m not particularly afraid of employers Googling me and finding things like my Facebook or Twitpic because I don’t have a single picture up of anything even remotely questionable. As for my blog, I swear a lot, but I limit that (generally) to posts that are less serious and far more conversational in tone. If anything, I’d hope that my blog posts would constitute a tally mark in the Charming category and not the Call the Cops NOW category.

Ode to Bacon

Here’s what people who grew up in a house with bacon don’t understand: bacon=independence. At least for me. When you’re a kid, or at least someone who lives in their parents’ house, you have a relative amount of freedom. You can order bacon cheeseburgers at restaurants. You can eat bacon at your friends’ houses. You can try (and occasionally fail)  to order it from your local food-cart man. But the one thing you can’t do if your parents are like mine is bring bacon into the house. Although it was not for lack of trying. My brothers have frequently attempted to sneak a package of bacon into the house, but it invariably ended with a sternly-worded speech from my mother on the affects of le pig lard on l’arteries. Or something to that affect.

So when I moved into my apartment, the first thing I did was buy a frying pan and head to the Reading Terminal to pick up half a pound of bacon. (By the way, if you’re hankering for some good-eatin bacon, my friend Albert highly recommends the double-smoked from the Fair Food Farmstand.) My bacon exuberance prompted folks to send me a fair number of bacon-centered foods, all of which I feel led to share with you, dear readers. Think of it as your late Christmas present. Or if you’re one of my baby cousins who keeps trying to eat the puppy’s faux bacon, think of it as Christmas Future. (There’s hope, kids. Please put down the dog food.)

And Now Back…

…to your regularly scheduled program. With more Philly goodness than ever.

Props to M.S. for hooking me up with this totally illegal sweet graphic.