Walking into a Buzz Cut?

Today, with the completion and turning in of one 40-page paper that I like and one 25-page paper that I hope earns forgiveness from my professor, I am finished with exams. As always, it has been the least fun part of the semester and I am so glad that I only have to do this two more times.

I start at the Office of Special Counsel on the 28th, and until then I'll be doing small projects for Street Law, Inc. and doing a bunch of paperwork.

I suppose I should explain the paperwork. Actually, it goes along with the "exciting news" I referenced in my last post. Actually, it goes all the way back to this post, when I mentioned an application that I had been working on since August. Actually, it goes back a bit further than that. I might make a post explaining more at some later date if and when this becomes official, but I will keep it short here.

For various reasons, I have been very interested in the JAG Corps since near the end of my 1L year when I was doing job research. JAG officers are lawyers in Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard who prosecute and defend during a court martial, give operational legal advice on the law of war, help service members with various legal issues, etc.... For additional various reasons, out of the five different types of JAG I vastly preferred Navy.

Navy JAG does its hiring differently from everyone else. In fact, you can apply as a 2L. So that's what I did back in October. Predictably, I did not get in during that round. I was expecting that, because the Navy gets WAY more applications for JAG than it has positions available. For 2012 it was something like a 4% acceptance rate. This is the primary reason I didn't tell anyone about this before now.

Anyway, I went into 2L year trying to structure my course load to make the Navy like me, and I applied again in February. I found out on Friday, May 3rd that this application was accepted, which means that if I pass a medical exam and security check I will be a Navy JAG officer starting sometime after I pass the bar in 2014 (I suppose that assumes I'm going to pass the bar). This is exactly what I want to do and is my #1 choice for career out of law school. I'm very excited about it, but I'm also trying to not make a big deal out of it in case I don't pass the commissioning process for some reason.

If everything goes well, then to answer the question you haven't asked: yes, I will pretty much be Tom Cruise from A Few Good Men. But taller.