The October Moment: Understanding and Building Belonging in Law School
If you’re reading this in early October of your first year in law school, and your experiences are anything like my own in my first year of law school, then you might be experiencing something unexpected right now.
Your initial excitement about making it to law school is waning, leaving a nagging question: This is not what I expected — do I really belong here?
You sit in your 1L classes watching classmates who seem effortlessly confident and eloquent, while you’re still decoding legal terminology, learning how to read a case and a rule, and second-guessing every answer. Was that Latin? When the professor calls on you, despite putting in hours before class, you struggle, and your mind goes blank. Ack! This leads to even more nagging doubts. You wonder whether everyone else “gets it” in a way you don’t. You brought a whole world with you to law school — your experiences, your perspectives, your passion for becoming a lawyer. But right now, these feel like evidence that maybe you’re different from everyone else in a way that matters, and you don’t belong.
If any of this rings true to you, here’s what you need to know: What you’re experiencing is common, it’s measurable, it matters, and it can be changed. You have more power than you realize to shape your own sense of belonging and to help others shape theirs. And we faculty and administrators across the country also share responsibility.
Why Belonging Matters — And Why It Can Grow
Research from LSAC found that students who thought about leaving law school in their first year reported feeling uncertain about their belonging in law school at a rate 24% higher than their peers who never considered leaving. Belonging isn’t just about feeling comfortable — it has a concrete impact on whether students persist and succeed in law school. But here’s more to the story. In our ongoing research with over 18,000 law students across three national studies, and in research recently published by the Equity Accelerator , we discovered a clear pathway: The quality of your relationships with your peers and faculty predicts your sense of belonging, which in turn predicts both your satisfaction with law school and your law school grades. Minoritized and first-generation students often report weaker relationships with their law school peers and faculty, which contributes to a lower sense of belonging, and this can lead to a self-fulfilling cycle. And here’s the critical finding: These patterns persist even after controlling for LSAT scores, meaning this isn’t about ability. It’s about relationships and the law school culture we co-create together.
The hopeful news is that belonging responds to the meaning we create and the actions we take together. At a diverse, broad-access undergraduate university, researchers designed a one-hour intervention for first-year students. The intervention helped students understand that struggles during the transition to college are normal and temporary, not signs of permanent unfitness. Two years later, persistence rates for students of color and first-generation students increased by nine percentage points — from 64% to 73%. That intervention was effective because it changed how students understood their daily experiences. The same kind of change is possible in law school.
What’s Actually Happening Right Now
You’re experiencing a form of something social psychologists call pluralistic ignorance: privately feeling uncertain about your abilities and belonging while assuming everyone else is confident about their own. I experienced it too. It’s a paradox — everybody feels different from everybody else, when really we’re all navigating the same challenging transition. Unfortunately, law school amplifies this pluralistic ignorance in specific ways. You’re learning an entirely new language filled with specialized terms and concepts: what exactly is a res judicata? You’re developing a fundamentally different form of reasoning — learning to “think like a lawyer.” The Socratic method is so performative and exposes your individual struggles publicly while hiding everyone else’s private doubts. Unless interrupted, the competitive culture of law school discourages admitting uncertainty about fitting in, let alone fallibility or human emotions. Everyone is adjusting simultaneously, but mostly silently.
Your doubts are NOT evidence that you don’t belong. They are evidence that you’re in the middle of a genuinely difficult transition that everyone else is going through too, including your classmates who appear most confident. The student who answered brilliantly in Contracts today probably went blank in Torts last week. The person who seems to have found their study group effortlessly this week might have felt completely alone last week. These feelings of belonging uncertainty are common to all, yet we all too often put on a good face and hide our true feelings and concerns below the surface.
What You Can Do — Starting Today
First, it will be helpful to reframe how you think about your struggles. Think back to your first semester of college. You probably felt overwhelmed then, too — a new environment, new expectations, new people. Over time, what felt foreign became familiar. The same process is happening now in law school, just with more specialized language and what feels like higher stakes in the classroom. What feels overwhelming today will become familiar with practice and time. Your story will follow the same arc you’d hear from any second- or third-year student: “When I first got to law school, I felt completely lost. Now, looking back, I realize everyone felt that way.” Difficult transitions highlight your determination and growth, not inadequacy.
Second, and most importantly, you’ll nourish your own sense of belonging by serving as the co-counsel for your classmates. Check in with people around you that you don’t know well. When someone struggles during a cold call, help them out — volunteer a supportive point, help clarify their answer, or continue their line of reasoning. Here’s what most people (and even some professors) don’t realize: classroom struggles often have nothing to do with understanding the material. They often stem from exhaustion, family emergencies, health issues, anxiety, and the life circumstances that affect all of us. When you step in to help another, you’re being their co-counsel in a moment when life made it hard for them to reveal what they know. And here’s the powerful and ironic, reciprocal benefit: Supporting others’ sense of belonging strengthens your own. When you reach out, you break the silence and discover shared experiences. You build exactly the kinds of relationships that our research shows predict a sense of belonging. What you give is what you receive.
Beyond supporting your peers, intentionally build your own network of support. Find 3-4 students and form a study group — this will help you create the supportive connections that will carry you through law school. Go to office hours and talk with professors with your study group (and ask for advice on how to outline and set up exam answers). Join student organizations, especially if you’re from a group that’s been historically marginalized in law. Talk with second- and third-year students about their first-year experiences and what worked for them. Use academic support services and counseling resources. Practice reframing daily adversities: one difficult cold call doesn’t mean you’re not law school material, just as not immediately finding your people doesn’t mean you’ll never belong here. We’re all human, with our frailties and all, and we’re doing our best to grow. It takes time.
What Law Schools Must Do
While you work to build a sense of belonging for yourself and others, law schools bear a responsibility too. They should cultivate cultures of growth that affirm every student’s potential to develop. Students can’t take risks and learn from mistakes when they’re defending against identity threat in the classroom. Law schools must clearly communicate that legal ability develops through effort, practice, and learning, rather than being fixed and innate. Everyone must feel valued, respected, and included.
Faculty mindsets matter enormously. Research with over 15,000 students found that courses taught by faculty with fixed mindsets — who believe legal ability is innate — showed twice the racial achievement gap as courses taught by growth-minded faculty. Growth-oriented professors engage in student-centered teaching, offer process praise that complements learning and problem-solving strategies, and frame mistakes as opportunities for growth. The burden of creating growth cultures shouldn’t fall solely on students. Faculty and institutions are better positioned to make these changes.
Schools must also address structural barriers. Students balancing work, family obligations, and long commutes face different challenges in building community. Law schools should create flexible opportunities for community building and embed belonging interventions into their curricula. They must pay particular attention to students with multiple marginalized identities who face intersectional challenges.
You Have Power Right Now
If you’re reading this in October, you’re in the thick of the transition — and that’s precisely where you should be. You have more power than you realize right now to shape your trajectory and that of others around you. One conversation. One moment of checking in with a struggling classmate. One study group meeting. One visit to office hours. These small acts create the relationships that foster a sense of belonging and create the culture around you that will help you and others thrive.
Someday soon, you’ll be the 2L or 3L telling a struggling 1L that what they’re feeling is normal and temporary. May you also be someone else’s co-counsel in class, helping them navigate their October moment. Belonging isn’t something you find — it’s something you build, for yourself and for others. You’re building it right now.
Grab a pen and paper and jot down three things that you can do today for yourself and others. Then take one step today. Reach out to one person. Support one classmate. Check in with someone you don’t know well. You belong in law school, and together, you’re co-creating a law school culture where everyone can grow and thrive.
