0L Networking: Proceed With Caution

In the months leading up to law school orientation, a lot of 0Ls, myself included, have been connecting with our future classmates online, through TLS threads and/or Class of 2015 Facebook groups. It's nice to be able to talk to people in the same situation and chat about moving/housing/other topics only other 0Ls seem to find fascinating, but there's also some tricky terrain to navigate with this sort of social networking.

If you choose to add future classmates as friends from the Facebook group without meeting/talking to them first, you have some choices to make. Who are you going to friend? Everyone in the group? To me, that seems a little overwhelming, but then that leads to another dilemma: how are you going to determine who would be a good  person to friend?

I've added a few people because their posts indicated we had something more in common than the school we'll be attending together, but quite a few of the people I've added have been friended on a whim because I saw them post on the group or reply to something from another 0L. And, unfortunately, I've very quickly found a reason to regret this second approach. A link I posted recently became the source of a drawn-out argument between a friend of mine and a randomly-added dude from the admitted students group. It was kind of like watching a very-compelling train wreck. When new notifications popped up, I winced and thought oh shit, what is it this time? At the same time, I was eager to see the latest development.

I restrained myself from fully jumping into the argument because I figured it wouldn't be good to start antagonizing future classmates before I even got to Minneapolis, but after watching it all play out, I don't think I'm going to worry too much about this particular one. Especially because, on top of arguing really poorly, I saw he had linked to a Sarah Jessica Parker-Looks-Like-A-Horse joke on his own wall, which is a great litmus test to determine if someone is an unimaginative asshole.

But on the other side of this, I haven't regretted friending anyone else (uh, so far) and even met some cool future classmates out in Real Life after making online contact first. Incidentally, my friend who was the person primarily arguing with randomly-added-dude was someone I also added on Facebook without having met her first, and she's one of my best friends now. That said, I'm looking forward to moving up in August so I can actually get to meet people face-to-face and start friendships in a more natural way than friending them on Facebook and hoping for the best.