This week’s post is: Midterms, Study Groups, Outlines, and Drama Comparable to High School.

Midterms

Depending on how your school works you’re going to have midterms.  For me this meant one midterm for a semester long class and 2 finals that are effectively midterms for my year long classes.  This midterm is probably going to be the most stressful thing you will face until you reach your bar exam.  Not because your particular midterm will be exceptionally difficult, but because of the pressure-cooker atmosphere your fellow 1Ls will create. The best piece of advice I can give to you to deal with this is to relax and remember that you know more than you think you know.  You’re always going to feel like your classmates know more/are doing more work/are 20 times smarter than you.  But the reality is that they probably don’t/aren’t, and while creating an 100 page outline for personal jurisdiction may work for some people it might not work for you.

The single best thing I can tell you is just to study in the best way for YOU.  The most difficult thing about your first midterm or finial or whatnot is the fact that you’ve never had a law school exam.  No matter how well or how poorly you do on your first exam you’re going to do better once you’ve taken one exam and you know what to expect.  If you have to study for 20 hours a day the entire week before the exam then do that.  If you have to write 500 color-coded flashcards do that.  If you only have to look over your outline for a few hours and you want to spend the day before the test relaxing and watching clips of cats on youtube then do that.

Study Groups

Anyone who has seen the Paper Chase has seen how a study group can devolve and eventually implode.  Don’t let that happen to you.  The thing that makes law school study groups different from any study group you may have had in college is that in college a study group may be formed last minute to review for a particular class or exam and you probably will never see the members of it again.  However in law school, if you form a good study group you will probably be spend a large amount of time on a semi-regular basis with these people for the rest of the year.

I have found that there are 3 basic types of study groups: the Gunner’s Paradise, the Talkers, and the Casuals. The Gunners Paradise is the group that is formed in the 2nd week of classes, it’s mostly inhabited by the intense gunner-type students who will either make you pull your hair out in frustration or who you will respect because they are as “committed” as you are.  The Talkers is a group that is larger than the normal 3-5 person size of most study groups.  It’s filled with a cliche of people who spend as much time gossiping about people in the section as they do being productive.  The Casuals is the type of group I’m a part of.  A group of people who get along at least reasonably well and who meet on a semi regular basis, but don’t rely completely on the study group.  They treat the group as a place to go over notes, work out problems, and maybe learn that one topic you couldn’t quite grasp in class.  These are the type I am in favor of.

The best advise I can give to you here is to find a group of people you’re compatible with.  You don’t have to be the best of friends, but it helps to form a group with people who have similar study habits as you.

Outlines

Outlines, almost no one is ever going to see them and they will never be graded, yet we still fear them.   Outlining is a very individual thing so it’s hard to give advise about it, but I will try and share a few useful tidbits I’ve found.  (1) Don’t split up your outlines within a study group.  I’m not sure who would do this but the real value in an outline comes from the process of creating it. You may never look at the thing after to you finish it, but I guarantee you that by organizing a topic and figuring what things are important will help you to better understand that class.  So do an individual one for each class.  (2) Don’t wait until the end of the semester to do it.  You don’t have to start your outline after your first day of classes, but they are a lot less intimidating if you at least have a basic structure to them early on.  It really depends though, my Property outline for example was really easy to do in a chronological order.  I just updated it whenever we’d finish a section and it worked out perfectly.  Civil Procedure though was another matter.  I just couldn’t wrap my head around it until we finished all of personal jurisdiction and I finally felt like I understood the topic enough to organize it in a semi-coherent fashion.

Drama Drama Drama

Law school is like freaking high school, you go to classes with the same exact people, you have lockers, and everyone is in everyone else’s business.  Just accept this.  It doesn’t seem so bad at first, but trust me it will get that way.  *You’re going to be gossiping about the guy who got a little too drunk at the faculty student mixer and started hitting on all the ladies in the section.  You’re going to watch the train wreck of awkwardness as couples form and break up within the section.  You’re going to wonder why that one girl in the section gets particularly enraged whenever you read promissory estoppel cases about unmarried couples.*  If you take the approach that I do and don’t get involved and just observe it can be particularity entertaining.  It’s kind of like watching a Spanish soap opera.

I’m really sorry this post was so long.  I blame being sick.  Here’s a cute cat video so you can forgive me:

*The facts of these “hypothetical” situations have been changed to protect the author of this post.

Related posts:

1. Tales from the 1L Underbelly
2. Bar Exam Classes v. Interesting Classes
3. 9 Reasons Why Law School Is Great
4. This is Your Brain on the Paper Chase