Tuesday, October 11, 2005

Disappointed

I didn't make the ADR board, no big surprise. Instead, the big surprise were people's reactions to not getting chosen. In the week before the competition, I started to regret ever signing up to participate. I felt like I'd been duped by the damn first year self-doubt that pushes 1L's to grasp at anything and everything that comes their way.

So I wasn't set on making this board (with 270 competitors I assumed the chances were slim anyhow), and it was a no-risk scenario, so I measured my effort accordingly. I prepared the night before the competition for about 6 hrs with my partner. He's a good guy and we had a decent time working on the problem. The next morning we competed and got feedback, which took all of an hour. Lump sum, I sunk a maximum of 8 hours into this competition, which isn't all that much in the scheme of things. Sure, there are lots of ways I could have had more fun on Friday night, and I could have foregone the nerves and getting up a little earlier than usual on Saturday morning. But all in all, it was a good experience, if for nothing else than to show me what a competing for a board is like and what mock-ADR is.

I thought it was a given that the judging was incredibly subjective, and that what it comes down to is what happens when you and your partner get in the room and start engaging the other team, which is subject to an endless amount of variation. So I was really surprised and put off by people's incensed attitude that the whole competition was a complete waste just because they didn't make the board. The big complaint was that the judging is all subjective --- but aren't most things in life? When you interview for a job, it's all subjective!

So while they're annoyed that they didn't make the board, I'm annoyed that no one I spoke with seemed to value the experience (and don't get me wrong, I'm hardly zen when it comes to competing, but really), that everyone was SO put out that they'd spent any of their oh-so-precious time on something that didn't produce a big reward. So there.

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