I spent the last two days back at the law school, running around taking care of errands and saying good-bye to various friends, faculty, and administration. BUSL really has great administrators and support staff. Law school is inherently taxing, but at least, thanks to them, it isn't needlessly so. As I read around the blogosphere I'm always hearing about these kafka-esque predicaments other law student bloggers are having to face at their schools, the kinds of things I've never had to face here. Here the administration is responsive, proactive, and dedicated to putting in systems that actually work for everyone. And, as a bonus, they are great people in their own right.
The one hiccup in finding faculty, however, was that they weren't where they used to be. Over the summer the law school renovated all the faculty suites. The result is that they all now have a clean, serene entrance area with fresh paint on the walls. The paint is red, to match the new website that will be fully launched soon, which itself matches the rest of the university's website and reddish color scheme. The law school used to be purple-themed, but it's now switching to red. Even the free BUSL pens in the registrar's office are now (as of this week) red too.
Of course, it is a little sad to see the faculty suites look so sterile. Without the piles and piles of paper they used to have, it just doesn't have that lived-in look... And with all the renovation lots of faculty have also moved offices. Not all of them, but just enough to make me need to crawl the halls trying to find nearly everyone I was looking for.
There's been some other changes too, like with the locker rooms. It used to be that 1Ls and 2Ls had to share lockers (although I was fortunate in that my lockermate never bothered to use it, so I had it to myself). Now everyone gets their own. The downside: that the brand new lockers they installed seem to be too narrow to put a backpack into. On the upside, however, the basement where they all live is now bright and light and not the dank dark dungeon it used to be. (As a 3L I got a new locker. I went to find it once, and then never went back. It was just too scary down there. It wasn't that I was afraid of crime, per se. But monsters were definitely a concern...)
The most traumatic change in the law school, though, were the banners in the main lobby welcoming back 2 and 3Ls, as well as the Class of 2009!!! I remember when 2006 seemed so far in the future, yet now it seems quite reasonable. But 2009...
Posted 9/2, a few days after it was written.