The Dunning Kreuger Effect: The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than in actuality; by contrast, the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to a perverse result where less competent people will rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. "Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."
By this standard, I am extremely competant in many areas! Unless, of course I am suffering from confirmation bias and optimistic-overcofidence about my ability to transcend my own optimistic-overconfidence regarding my own under-ratings of my skills and sense of inferiority because I secretly understand the Dunning Kreuger effect and am mentally twisting it to achieve a sense of illusory-incompetence-inferiority-superiority! Which, knowing myself (if I do in fact know myself, although many cognitive biases would suggest I actually do not at all but merely ascribe post-hoc rational explanations to the random actions I take and affiliations I feel, all of which I ultimately do not understand but feel the need to form into a cohesive story about my own identity), I would so not put past myself!
This, incidentally is what happens when you spend too much time studying human behavior either through the social sciences or ADR (I am - I think - doing the latter). It's like Med-Student hypochondria, but with a more existentialist sort of feel.
Anyways, when I'm not paralyzing myself with too much second guessing of my basic motivations (nobody analyzes Baby into a corner!), I am quite well. Summer and all that this entails is upon me. What it namely entails is a reprieve of sorts. Being a law student is similar to being a new mother in many ways (you can no longer speak normal adult english, you're increasingly socially isolated, you no longer have a reliable sleep pattern, you may not have changed in days, hopefully there is less spit-up involved, but then I've met many law students... these are a few) and summer is kind of like when you finally send the kids off to camp for a few weeks and slowly become re-acquainted with your sanity for a few days before it all begins again (OCI, wait noooo I don't have a job for four years from now yet??? NOOOOOOOOO).
There were a few moments of detachment panic during my actual break, but these have subsided now that I've adjusted to being alive and differently burdened. I'm now at my externship, which is delightfully downtown near Pioneer Square. My work schedule is highly flexible, as are my duties. At the moment, I've taken it upon myself to revise the Labor Law crash course that it highly out of date, but have played around with many more mediation-centered tasks as well. My coworkers are all great - according to their ilk, they form an "emotionally intelligent" work group together - and it's nice to be in an office environment again. I can't quite articulate why it's different from school, but it is. Very different.
I'm also doing some more work for my Research Assistant job - just odds and ends at this point, having finished up some work on the teacher's manual during break, but it's nice to keep up with the adoption law thread as it is all quite fascinating. In related but more distant news, I've qualified for work-study (FINALLY!) so I can in fact work as the intake person for the UW mediation clinic next year. Last week, for a good dose of diverse legal education outside the classroom, I attended the American Health Law Association's national meeting. I came out of the three day conference with a shaky understanding of health law reform (holy crap, the newspapers are useless in explaining anything, by the way), the rosy glow of having seen some of my coworkers from last year, fifty promotional pens, and a purse full of fruit/pastries/odd-and-useless-advertiser's-toys (law student scrounging urges kicked in).
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