jiefo Blog

Jan 2026

I entered my first year of law school at Berkeley Law with modest goals. Although I’ve always considered myself a good student, I was unsure whether I could thrive in the law school grading environment. I understood that, given the unpredictable nature of the grading curve (in law schools generally, only the top ~10% of students can get an “A” grade in any given class), my academic results would not necessarily directly correlate with my individual effort. 

Fortunately, I found great academic success in my first year, and I was proud of my achievement because I felt that my input (effort and hard work) was reflected in the result. I was in the top ~5-10% of many of my courses, and in one case, received the #1 score. This success allowed me to transfer to Stanford Law for the remainder of my law degree. Stanford was my dream law school and is one of the most selective institutions, and when I received the phone call, I had no hesitation about enrolling. 

When I got to Stanford Law, I carried many burdens: the burden of expectations from my 1L academic success; the burden of imposter syndrome and being labeled a “transfer”; and the burden of making it “worth it” to transfer.

After my first quarter, I could not replicate the academic excellence I had at Berkeley. I had high hopes of doing so and felt that I had put in sufficient effort to get good results. I am conclusively “average.”

And so I am wrestling with what exactly defines “success” outside of law school. Certainly, my grades this quarter are no longer at the top. But I made new friends at Stanford; I tried new hobbies (like tennis) and restarted old ones (boxing and Muay Thai); I had new experiences, such as my first Lakers game and first musical Concert (Sabrina Carpenter); and I took time to travel and see my family. 

This is not to say I have given up on academic excellence. But as I wrote in my personal journal before the grades were released, I was proud of the effort I put in, even though the results did not necessarily reflect it (this time). And such is life: very rarely are results deterministic.

“Success” is not exclusively a function of effort—luck cannot be ignored—but nonetheless, I can only influence my own efforts.

So I will be proud of myself when I do achieve my goals, but also give myself grace that luck and imponderables may be at play at either end.

In the short term, I often place undue importance on events and struggle to see the long term. Humans often overestimate what we can accomplish in the short term, but underestimate what we can accomplish in the long term. At no point in my life while growing up did I genuinely believe that I would be able to call myself a Stanford student—yet here I am. A successful legal career is in no way dependent on one quarter or semester of grades; physical health is not ruined (nor actualized) by a weekend of holiday festivities; a life of loneliness is not conclusively determined by a single relationship failing. 

I have much more ahead of me: in law school, in my career, in my personal, health, and social goals. And I hope to return to this entry as a reminder to my future self that it was all okay after all. And I hope that, next quarter, I’ll be able to look back at this entry and be thankful that I never gave up. One quarter down, five more to go!