A Student Perspective on the Wilmington University Farnan School of Law
If you want to understand the Wilmington University Farnan School of Law, skip the brochure and stand in the parking lot at 6 o’clock on a Tuesday. You will see pickup trucks with ladder racks and minivans with car seats. You will see scrubs, work boots and badge lanyards from jobs that started 10 hours earlier. You will see people eating dinner out of a lunchbox with a casebook open on the hood. Then you will watch all of them walk into a Contracts classroom and take notes like their futures depend on it, because they do.
I am one of them. I grew up in working-class Baltimore, went to a vocational-technical high school and spent more than 20 years in mortgage banking and real estate finance before I ever briefed a case. Today I work in the real estate title field by day and study law by night. I am a husband, a father of three and the first person in my family to attempt anything like this. I came to law school in my mid-40s with a full-time job, a mortgage and no playbook.
When I was deciding where to apply, I noticed something quickly. At most law schools, a student like me is an exception to be accommodated, welcomed but slotted into a program designed around someone else’s life. Here, we are not the exception. We are the point, and this school was built for us.
The mission is not buried in a strategic plan; it is visible in every design decision. An evening division that respects a workday. A calendar that assumes its students have lives, employers and children. An admissions philosophy that reads 20 years of work as evidence rather than as an anomaly.
This school exists to open the profession to people the traditional pipeline passes by: the midcareer professional, the working parent and the first-generation student. It does not treat that mission as charity. It reflects a deliberate commitment to the idea that working adults with experience, discipline and responsibilities can thrive in a rigorous law school when the program is built with their lives in mind. The people in that parking lot intend to honor that confidence through their work, their achievements and the lawyers they become.
The faculty turns that commitment into an education. My professors have practiced, argued, closed and counseled at the highest levels of this profession, and they bring that experience into the classroom every night. They teach with the clarity of people who have actually done the work, and they hold the standard high precisely because they know where we are headed.
Nobody waters anything down for the evening division. What they do instead is meet us where we are: office hours that assume you have a job, feedback that arrives with red ink and a path forward, and a level of personal investment I did not expect at any law school, let alone mine. My legal writing professors rebuilt the way I think on paper. My seminar professor pushed a research paper through more drafts than I can count until it was ready to leave the building.
Excellence is the expectation here, and the people delivering it know our names.
Then there is the part nobody warned me about, because it contradicts everything the culture says about law school. This place is collaborative. The stereotype says law students hoard outlines and hide library books. In our section, when a classmate’s shift runs long, the notes are in the group chat before he gets to his car. Outlines get shared. Practice questions get built together. When someone’s kid gets sick during finals, five people offer to help before the professor has even replied.
The curve is real, but the competition is never personal, and I think I know why. When your classmates are nurses, contractors, veterans and parents, nobody has the time or the taste for sabotage. We have all worked in real workplaces. We know the difference between competing and rowing, and we row.
There is a particular pride in this student body that is easy to feel and hard to label. We are a new school. Our traditions are not inherited; they are being built in real time by the people in the room. Every study group that outlasts a semester, every organization that gets founded, and every paper that leaves this building and lands somewhere impressive becomes part of a foundation that students decades from now will stand on without knowing our names.
Nobody here confuses new with lesser. We know exactly what makes us unique: a mission that gathered a student body no other school in the region looks like and the shared understanding that we are not just attending an institution. We are helping to build one.
In May, the school took the name of Judge Joseph J. Farnan Jr., whose five decades of service to this University were built on the belief that education should be accessible, affordable and open to all. It is fitting. The name over the door now says what the parking lot has said all along.
Last summer, that combination produced something I could not have imagined two years ago. In a faculty-supervised research seminar, I wrote a 30-page paper, with 72 footnotes, on one of the most current land-use questions in Maryland, and it is now under review at legal journals.
The kid from the vocational school did that because professors demanded excellence, classmates cheered instead of calculated, and the school’s mission said that a midcareer father of three belonged in the room where that work gets done.
People ask me whether it is hard, working all day and studying all night, and the honest answer is yes. It is supposed to be. But hard work was never the thing my classmates and I lacked. We arrived with that already in hand. What we needed was a place that took our lives seriously, and this school built one on purpose.
The legal profession gets better when it draws from a deeper well. The Farnan School of Law deepened it deliberately, and the proof is sitting in the parking lot at 6 o’clock, eating dinner out of a lunchbox, about to walk inside and get to work.
—Rick Metzgar
Rick Metzgar is a 2L in the evening division at the Wilmington University Farnan School of Law, Class of 2029. He works in the real estate title field and lives in Harford County, Maryland, with his wife, Sarah, and their three children. He writes about the first-generation and nontraditional law school experience at Grit and Gavel JD, a platform and professional brand he founded.
Want to read more in-depth stories? Explore our latest magazine articles.
A Student Perspective on the Wilmington University Farnan School of Law
If you want to understand the Wilmington University Farnan School of Law, skip the brochure and stand in the parking lot at 6 o’clock on a Tuesday. You will see pickup trucks with ladder racks and minivans with car seats. You will see scrubs, work boots and badge lanyards from jobs that started 10 hours earlier. You will see people eating dinner out of a lunchbox with a casebook open on the hood. Then you will watch all of them walk into a Contracts classroom and take notes like their futures depend on it, because they do.
I am one of them. I grew up in working-class Baltimore, went to a vocational-technical high school and spent more than 20 years in mortgage banking and real estate finance before I ever briefed a case. Today I work in the real estate title field by day and study law by night. I am a husband, a father of three and the first person in my family to attempt anything like this. I came to law school in my mid-40s with a full-time job, a mortgage and no playbook.
When I was deciding where to apply, I noticed something quickly. At most law schools, a student like me is an exception to be accommodated, welcomed but slotted into a program designed around someone else’s life. Here, we are not the exception. We are the point, and this school was built for us.
The mission is not buried in a strategic plan; it is visible in every design decision. An evening division that respects a workday. A calendar that assumes its students have lives, employers and children. An admissions philosophy that reads 20 years of work as evidence rather than as an anomaly.
This school exists to open the profession to people the traditional pipeline passes by: the midcareer professional, the working parent and the first-generation student. It does not treat that mission as charity. It reflects a deliberate commitment to the idea that working adults with experience, discipline and responsibilities can thrive in a rigorous law school when the program is built with their lives in mind. The people in that parking lot intend to honor that confidence through their work, their achievements and the lawyers they become.
The faculty turns that commitment into an education. My professors have practiced, argued, closed and counseled at the highest levels of this profession, and they bring that experience into the classroom every night. They teach with the clarity of people who have actually done the work, and they hold the standard high precisely because they know where we are headed.
Nobody waters anything down for the evening division. What they do instead is meet us where we are: office hours that assume you have a job, feedback that arrives with red ink and a path forward, and a level of personal investment I did not expect at any law school, let alone mine. My legal writing professors rebuilt the way I think on paper. My seminar professor pushed a research paper through more drafts than I can count until it was ready to leave the building.
Excellence is the expectation here, and the people delivering it know our names.
Then there is the part nobody warned me about, because it contradicts everything the culture says about law school. This place is collaborative. The stereotype says law students hoard outlines and hide library books. In our section, when a classmate’s shift runs long, the notes are in the group chat before he gets to his car. Outlines get shared. Practice questions get built together. When someone’s kid gets sick during finals, five people offer to help before the professor has even replied.
The curve is real, but the competition is never personal, and I think I know why. When your classmates are nurses, contractors, veterans and parents, nobody has the time or the taste for sabotage. We have all worked in real workplaces. We know the difference between competing and rowing, and we row.
There is a particular pride in this student body that is easy to feel and hard to label. We are a new school. Our traditions are not inherited; they are being built in real time by the people in the room. Every study group that outlasts a semester, every organization that gets founded, and every paper that leaves this building and lands somewhere impressive becomes part of a foundation that students decades from now will stand on without knowing our names.
Nobody here confuses new with lesser. We know exactly what makes us unique: a mission that gathered a student body no other school in the region looks like and the shared understanding that we are not just attending an institution. We are helping to build one.
In May, the school took the name of Judge Joseph J. Farnan Jr., whose five decades of service to this University were built on the belief that education should be accessible, affordable and open to all. It is fitting. The name over the door now says what the parking lot has said all along.
Last summer, that combination produced something I could not have imagined two years ago. In a faculty-supervised research seminar, I wrote a 30-page paper, with 72 footnotes, on one of the most current land-use questions in Maryland, and it is now under review at legal journals.
The kid from the vocational school did that because professors demanded excellence, classmates cheered instead of calculated, and the school’s mission said that a midcareer father of three belonged in the room where that work gets done.
People ask me whether it is hard, working all day and studying all night, and the honest answer is yes. It is supposed to be. But hard work was never the thing my classmates and I lacked. We arrived with that already in hand. What we needed was a place that took our lives seriously, and this school built one on purpose.
The legal profession gets better when it draws from a deeper well. The Farnan School of Law deepened it deliberately, and the proof is sitting in the parking lot at 6 o’clock, eating dinner out of a lunchbox, about to walk inside and get to work.
—Rick Metzgar
Rick Metzgar is a 2L in the evening division at the Wilmington University Farnan School of Law, Class of 2029. He works in the real estate title field and lives in Harford County, Maryland, with his wife, Sarah, and their three children. He writes about the first-generation and nontraditional law school experience at Grit and Gavel JD, a platform and professional brand he founded.
Want to read more in-depth stories? Explore our latest magazine articles.
