Law School Discussion

I am always so hopped up on caffeine that if they wouldn't let me use the restroom at will I would rage.

Wally gives good advice. How he has grown his 1L year...good man.

I will endorse everything that has already been said on here.

The key is to just "relax" after a while...1st semester will be bad because you kind of have to go through the fire in order to get it.

Like Wally said, there is "the law" and then there are a bunch of irrelevant facts and nonsense that are easy to become overloaded with.

Most importantly, though, everyone should take time (a lot of it, perhaps)to stop and smell the roses. Life and the world are continuing along quite well outside the law school walls, and while it's dark and cloudy within sometimes, please take a step outside and get some perspective. Your life-balance meter will inch back towards "normal" and you will be the better for it.

What else...appreciate your classmates. Everyone is pretty smart, and they are fun and interesting. Get to know them. You will find that, no matter how you or they did when you get your first semester grades back, you will feel much better about the whole thing if you realize that everyone is competent, flawed, capable...etc. If you just go through 1L year with blinders on, you will begin to think that your classmates are a bunch of losers or geniuses, depending on how your grades turn out, and it could isolate you even more.

Law school is competitive, but it doesn't have to be maddeningly so. All life is a sort of competition...how you act during it will make all the difference as far as stress and amiable relationships you get out of it.

Finally, don't take it so goddamn seriously all the time. You made it into a good law program and you WILL be a lawyer in three years. Nobody knows what they're doing first semester, you're not alone. Walk three blocks to the shite part of town one afternoon after class and you will feel 100x better about your "miserable" life in law school once you see your first toothless hobo. Perspective.

And to everyone reading this now...pre-1L summer...RELAX! I would have taken more vacations, spent more time with friends I wouldn't be seeing much in the future, and the like. You're not going to get those pre-law school summers back ever again...for the love of God please take fall advantage of them.

It seems like half of my class has gotten lazy and/or resigned themselves to not trying.

There is hope.

4. Meet a giant fish, @#!* its brains out.

LMAO this is one of the last sentences I said before retiring for the evening.

Re: Wally's strategy, is sort of turning into mine except not so slacktastical. 1st semester I overloaded my head with garbage, so this semester I purposefully didn't pay attention to crap beyond the BLL. I was more diligent about work all this semester, though, up until about a few weeks ago. It's been a slide ever since. Did you guys know I found my old Pokemon Red for Game Boy?

Anyways, the way I see it is, we learned and discussed the @#!* out of this stuff all semester, all that's needed is a little review. Half the exams are open-note anyways so that calls for checklists and/or pre-planned answers. No reason to kill oneself flipping out the last two weeks. How will you be alive for petitioning?

The worse I think I did, the better I allways do, the better I think I did, the worse I actually do, been that way for five years. Its over, move on and worry about when you get your grades, no good to worry about it now.

Yeah, this seems to be some kind of strange, iron law of exam taking for me. No matter how great I think I do on an exam, I end up with a mediocre grade. The exams I felt like I bombed always came back with good grades. Go figure.