As we officially open the school year, I have been thinking a lot about what are the secrets to success in law school. I understand that Dean Rofes spoke at Orientation about the sausage races at Miller Park. (I personally always root for the Chorizo Sausage!) Law school may sometimes feel a bit like a race, or, to think more classically about Aesop’s fables, like the story of the Tortoise and the Hare. In that story, the tortoise ultimately wins the race using slow and steady steps to the finish line.
What does slow and steady have to do with law school? Be steady by being methodical. Read and brief cases before every class. Be steady by outlining every night when you get home from class. An hour of outlining nightly will save you from the panic of trying to cram material at the end of the semester. Outlining each day also helps you to see where you have questions, so you can ask your professors or study group members to help you unravel those questions. One of the benefits of a Marquette education is that the faculty are accessible; use that accessibility to your advantage.
Be also like the tortoise by being slow. The study of law takes time. It takes time to ponder why a decision was rendered or to think about whether a court’s reasoning is sound. One of the ASP leaders in my Orientation section said that it takes at least ten minutes to read each page in a casebook. Good legal reading, like good legal writing, is slow going.
What tips do others reading this blog have for success in law school? Share your strategies for success here!
Best wishes for a wonderful school year!
The two most important things, in my opinion?
1.) Ask questions about anything and everything you’re studying when you have them! Ask them of professors, of fellow students, of anyone who might know the answer. My biggest mistake was giving in to peer pressure for a stretch of my 1L year and trying not to ask as many questions because “no one wants to be a gunner.” Hey, students are paying more than $30,000 a year in tuition to go to MULS; why waste that money by pretending you understand everything when you don’t? There’s no need to suffer alone.
2.) Befriend people who have been there before. If you’re a 1L and you have a tough class/professor/sub-topic, chances are a 2L or 3L has had the same problem and can give sound advice on how to fix it. And even if they can’t, sometimes it’s nice just to have someone who can empathize from experience.
The best advice I ever got (although I don’t even remember from whom), and the advice I gave to people as an ASP leader:
Law school is just school.
You are good at school.
They would not have let you in if you were not good at school.
Yes, everyone else here is good at school and you’re competing against them but there is nothing you can do about any one of them. Freaking out about them will not help you. The amount and quality of studying you do has no bearing on how anyone else will do. So, do what you can to ignore them (well, don’t ignore them as people but ignore them as competition) and focus on doing the best you can, for you.
If that means a thrice-weekly study group, or claiming a quiet carrel for the semester, go for it.
If that means technicolor highlighting, or no highlighting, or just underlining, or outlining starting in September, or not outlining at all, do what you need to.
If that means spending an inordinate amount of time sitting in poor posture on your couch, reading Torts, eating something like goldfish crackers mixed with ranch dressing, “Top Chef” on in the background and a “honey,how do you clean ketchup mixed with red wine and, um, glass out of a rug?/oh, there’s no reason, I’m just asking” interrupting you every 20 minutes, then that’s what you do. (*Cough.*)
Good luck to everyone…and Go Kielbasa!
Good advice! I thought I’d also link to the recent post on the Law librarian’s blog about the futility of multitasking: http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/law_librarian_blog/2009/08/multitaskers-can-have-uh-cognitive-problems.html. I am trying to retrain myself to do one thing, and only one thing, at a time, as much as possible. That seems like good advice for law school, too.