One of my cast mates from Legal Follies is a tour guide for the law school. This being tour season, with all of you new admits (congrats!) coming to check out your new digs, it’s not uncommon to hear an inordinate amount of complaints about the tower elevators.
For those of you unfamiliar with the architectural marvel that is the the BU Law Tower, here are the facts: the Law Tower is, according to Wikipedia, the tallest law school building in the United States. It has only six elevators to travel 17 stories + a basement and serving ~850 students (not counting faculty and staff). The math doesn’t even pass a cursory review. And these elevators aren’t exactly what I would call “cutting edge”. It’s not that they’re dirty or ugly – they’re not modern art, but they’re certainly clean. The sole issue is that they are very slow. There are times when it takes 5-10 minutes to get from the ground floor to a 14th floor class due to all the other stops the elevator has to make – it happens, and it’s frustrating.
Everyone complains about the elevators. But that means one of two things: either the elevators are the biggest complaint about the law school, or they are the only complaint about the law school. I won’t be so naive as to suggest that, save the elevators, one could not improve the facilities or the school in general. In fact, there are continued rumblings that the Law Tower will be expanding sometime in the next decade, so clearly change is happening on many fronts.
What I’m trying to say, though, is that if your biggest complaint about the law school is its elevators, you’ve found your academic home for three years. At that point, you’ve accepted the location, the student atmosphere, the faculty, and all of the other really important factors in deciding a law school. Plus, the elevators really are a blessing in many ways – they allow you a couple of minutes before class to regain your breath and catch up with other students crammed standing in there with you. You may not ever get over the elevators, but you might as well make the best of it – at least until one of the deans accepts my recommendation to put a rock wall on the side of the building.
