The past is in the past. The best thing we can do is acknowledge what happened, learn from our mistakes, move on, and keep trying our best in the hope that tomorrow is a better day.

Although I didn’t want to admit it at the time, my first semester of law school was pretty rough. Let me explain.

In the middle of 2024, I was high on life. Graduating with honors from Oregon State, with all the awards you could think of given to me by the university for my time in FIJI, I was feeling a hero. In a span of seven weeks, I packed all of my things up, said goodbye to all of my closest friends, and drove with my Dad 2,400 miles in my Honda Accord to a city and state I had briefly visited once. It was a fresh and exciting start, so I thought.

Upon arriving to Louisville and starting law school, I was overwhelmed. Not only was I missing my friends in Oregon more than I expected, but I struggled to understand the concepts of Torts and Contracts more than I cared to admit, and failed to pay attention at all in Civil Procedure. Rather than ask for help, overconfidence took over that my ability to wing it and bullshit my way out of things, which worked well in undergrad, would come in and save me once again. Only that didn’t happen. And I got humbled for it. When I opened my grades in January while visiting friends in Corvallis, everything caught up with me at once. I finished the semester with a 2.6 GPA. I remember sitting there in shock, staring at the screen. I went from feeling like a hero to feeling like a zero.

To say I was humbled was an understatement. Not only had I never done that poorly in an academic term, but it tore through my perceived identity of being smart, which I had relied on for so long to get myself through life. Other people, it turns out, are smart too.

On my flight back to Louisville, and later in the Uber to my apartment, I kept asking myself what I was supposed to do next. I knew my life wasn’t over, but it sure felt like it. I was embarrassed to talk about my GPA with anyone. All of the grand plans I had for big law and summer jobs suddenly felt completely out of reach, and I had no idea what the next move was.

I can’t say that the days after getting my grades back and starting Spring Semester 2025 were easy, but I got through it, with goals in mind of what I wanted to achieve and looking at things from a lens of humility, which I hadn’t really done before. I can’t tell you that every day was easy after that, but I survived and focused on improving what I did wrong. And that took admitting things to myself and confronting the fact that if things were going to change, we have to be honest with ourselves. And the interesting thing was, what I thought I was doing wrong ended up not being the case when I met with my professors to discuss my final exams, which serves to prove that we need external sources as well from experienced guides to help us get back on track.

And now, things are better. Yesterday I got my Fall 2L semester grades back. I got a 3.35. I’m not super enthused with my grades, but I’m relieved that I’m moving in the right direction after that first semester, and was able to improve my overall GPA after what was the toughest academic semester of my life so far. And after a year of having to face reality, things are good in my life. My GPA is going back up. I just got a great job at Sazerac that I start next week. I’m a TA for one of the Constitutional Law classes. I’ve got an amazing girlfriend now. And I’ve got awesome friends, too. I can’t say that every aspect of my life is perfect now, but it’s an improvement that happened because I had to be honest with myself in those tough moments and learn to have some grit in a competitive environment.

Setbacks are unavoidable. When they happen, acknowledging them matters. I hate toxic positivity and pretending problems don’t exist, because ignoring a fall doesn’t help you get back up the mountain. What does help is sitting with the discomfort, letting yourself feel it, and then making a plan to climb again. Maybe that means adjusting your approach, changing paths, or slowing down. Success depends just as much on your ability to get back up as it does on moving forward.

I can’t say that every day after getting my grades back that first semester has been easy. But I learned something important: that I survived it. And more than that, I learned how to survive setbacks without letting them define me. That’s something I didn’t know how to do before law school. I had always relied on momentum and confidence to keep going. This time, they didn’t, and I had to build something sturdier than confidence to keep going where momentum felt like it was lost.

A year ago, I was embarrassed and convinced that I was cooked. Today, my life isn’t perfect, but it is undeniably better. Not because everything magically worked out, but because I figured out what wasn’t working and took responsibility for fixing it.

Setbacks have a way of stripping you down to what actually matters. They force you to confront who you are when things don’t go according to plan. If you’re in that place right now, staring at a disappointment you didn’t think you’d have to face, know this: the fall doesn’t end the story. What matters is whether you get up, reassess, and keep climbing, even if it’s slower or on a different path than you imagined.

What’s done is done, and the only real choice left is what we do next. So keep going, take what you’ve learned, and show up again tomorrow. Even if you feel like you’ve failed, it is not over. If nothing else, it’s a brand new day to keep moving forward.

-Colby