Paul Horwitz offers the following advice to entering first-year law students: "Drink the Kool-Aid."

Joining a profession is a little like learning a new language, and a lot like joining a cult. (Or "new religious movement," for the scholars.) Don't resist it. There's a wonderfully awful book called Anarchy and Elegance, about a year spent by a journalist as a Yale 1L. He writes quite accurately about how law school changes your mindset, but by standing outside the process and resisting it almost entirely, he fails to learn half of what he could and to understand most of the other half. I am not advising you to abandon any critical perspective on the law and the legal profession, on professionalism and acculturation in general, and on law school. But if you are only critical, without willingly absorbing any of what you are learning, you will become a half-educated cynic. To a certain degree, to get the most out of law school -- the most education, but also the most joy -- you must give yourself over to the process and allow law school to remake your mind a little. There will be time enough to cast a critical eye back over what you've learned and to ask whether all of the law and the legal profession's assumptions are correct -- indeed, you'll get plenty of that in law school itself, given my suspicion that a decreasing number of law professors actually "think like lawyers," for better and worse. But you've got to immerse yourself first. So, drink the Kool-Aid; join the cult.

That was actually advice item #6 out of a list of 7 items, but I thought it was the most provocative. Check out the post for more.