That kind of stuff. Life-changing stuff.
“It’s just one thing after another,” she said.
Catherine Smith is not alone. She knows it – and, if you are/were a law school student – you may be nodding and confirming that, yes, the struggle is real. It is “a thing,” especially in the world of first-year students.
Reading. Preparing for exams. More reading. Preparing for assessments. Keep reading. Classes. Did you read? Add to the stress of law school studies, work, family, and social life (stop laughing). Now let’s add to the mix, the disruptive force of COVID-19, and it can be paralyzing.
“Coming from that single parent home, a single income home, I worked three jobs when I was an undergrad,” said Smith. “Financially, law school was not feasible. Then, COVID hit everyone pretty dang hard.”
During her senior year in college, Smith took the LSAT. She spent the next month studying. It paid off. Smith said she scored “relatively well,” good enough in fact to apply to 11 different law schools in the Midwest.
“I talked with my godmother, and she told me about her time in Charleston,” she said. “Then I saw Charleston School of Law and I loved how relatively new it was to the area and I decided to apply.”
Not long after she pushed the submit button on her application, Smith received a call from Charleston School of Law Dean Jacqueline Bell. She had been accepted to attend the school.
“I was in tears on the phone,” she remembers. “I was like, this is the best day of my life. I was just sitting there on the couch with all my sorority sisters around me just holding me at that point.”
After visiting Charleston, Smith decided to accept the offer to attend Charleston School of Law.
“I was here for four days by myself,” she said. “I never traveled by myself before. I had never flown by myself before. I did it all completely by myself. I love the area. I love the people. I loved the school. I just decided to pack up all my stuff and my dog in my Traverse and move down here. That’s how I got here.”
Then, just a month into her new adventure, Catherine’s mother called to tell her she had been diagnosed with COVID-19.
“She was hospitalized and put in intensive care,” she said. “My mom had acute bronchitis along with a progressive stage of pneumonia in her lungs. Her oxygen levels were so low she could barely breathe. It began affecting her mental health. She started getting delusional.”
Lawyers are trained to be prepared; it is the foundation for success. Training the mind for all the potential twists and turns minimizes the risk of failure. But what happens when you are blindsided by life?
“I hit rock bottom, to be completely honest with you,” said Smith. “It was kind of unbelievable. It felt like I was watching the world moving and I was stuck. But I knew that there’s only so much that I can do 15 ½ hours away. That’s something I kept telling myself. I couldn’t come home on the weekend and be here with someone that I can’t even be around because they have COVID, and then possibly bring it back.”
She decided to stay in Charleston, a decision that she still haunts her from time-to-time. “I definitely have guilt,” she said. “It was a selfish moment, choosing yourself above everyone else. I knew that my mom had COVID. For me, I was separating my emotions from what I needed to get done.”
“I learned so much about myself,” she said. “I’ve always lived by the saying, ‘When you hit rock bottom, all you have is up.’ I realized my own strength. My mom raised me on that strength.”
