First Post

It’s a process. It’s a process. It’s a process.

I remember telling myself that in early undergrad. There really wasn’t a plan in place. I was a loser. There was no adequate grasp of my strengths and weaknesses. Instead there was a “young adult” who was quick to jump the gun on conclusions that were for the most part wrong. For being a kid that was all about “the process,” I was focused on drawing the conclusions instead.

I met the LSAT in my Junior year of college. Again, I mistakenly thought that I was going to have perfect grasp on the matter (aka jumping to radical conclusions). And Holy Shit I was wrong. I think I scored a 135 first time around. There was an immediate doubt in my abilities as a student. Looking at blog articles online, I remember feeling hopeless. Inadequate as you will. I had almost overnight developed a sense of doubt, pushing this conclusion that I was a class A dumb ass.

I couldn’t tell my family at first. There had never been any doubt that I would do well on this test. We jumped the gun on that one. Nobody in my family had ever been to law school, nor had they been to graduate school. And I had made it seem like it’d be a cakewalk to a top 14 school. Big mistake there.

It wasn’t for a while that I told them my score, and the truth behind the fact. Perhaps I never would have told them, but there was a dead giveaway that I was going to go on and keep studying despite the fact that I was in the bottom ten percent of all test takers. But I figured they would have to know that I’d (1) have to retake and (2) need to score considerably better to even get into a law school worth attending.

The process of studying was not what I’d call easy. I remember having trouble at first grasping sufficient/necessary assumptions. Sometimes I still struggle there, but I’m considerably better than I was. The key to achieving adequacy here was looking at arguments through the lens of “what makes an argument lose” and “what helps and argument win.” This was something I learned from a class and it stuck with me.

A necessary assumption is what “needs to be true” for an argument “to be true.” If it is false the argument loses. So in my case, I made the assumption that I could reach the capacity to get into a law school that had decent reputable standing. And I determined that without a good enough LSAT score that was not possible. Therefore, I determined that my admission required a good LSAT score. That was a necessary assumption. If that statement was false, my argument would become invalid.

A sufficient assumption is what helps an argument win. It doesn’t necessarily need to be true for a specific conclusion, but it helps to make that conclusion possible. So for example, I determined that it was sufficient to achieve a good LSAT score in doing a practice test a week, and blind review all answer choices. But that wasn’t necessary, as there are a lot of ways to achieve a good LSAT score. Not just my way.

But even those two concepts took time for me to grasp adequately. And even after gaining sufficient proficiency there, I had a long way to go.

It took a change in thinking about myself and arguments of others. I had to first humble myself in that I wasn’t a prodigy kid and that my argument skills were inadequate. It took the realization that there was more than one way to solve a problem, and that a brand new solution wasn’t always necessary in doing so. It wasn’t until about a year into my studying that changed fully in everyday conversations with others.

Now I am freshly out of that process. I’m the new kid on the block. A 0L. I look to attend Marquette Law School this upcoming fall. I finished the process scoring decent enough to get into a good amount of schools and pick the one that I felt was best based on a variety of factors. I didn’t put up legendary numbers. But instead, decent ones.

I’m here to do what I can to show the process to others, and help out the best I can. I hope to do this through my blog here. Thanks for reading my first blog post. I’m new at this but hope to get better through time.

Brandon Zegiel – University of Illinois Alum – Marquette ’22