Official Orientation Schedule

Orientation--"Initial induction of new employees into organizations.  Objectives include developing employee commitment, easing anxiety, promoting organizational expectations and explaining what the employee can gain from working with the organization.”

-Black's Law Dictionary

 

 

 

 

The past few days have been extremely exciting!  Saturday was my last day of work for the summer (see you in October, Banana Republic!) and things started to come together for law school.  I received my parking permit, scheduled the delivery for my brand new couch, and the admissions office finally sent out the schedule and readings for orientation!  They also provided some information about buying textbooks and our fall schedules but we won’t have our final section assignments until the first day of orientation.

Law School Orientation
In college, I helped out with orientation for the first years so this will be the third straight year I have to sit through an orientation.  Except this time it’s actually for me, which makes it a lot more exciting.  The official orientation programming lasts three days, from a Wednesday to Friday, and the Saturday after, there is a voluntary service project to help clean up one of the parks in the city, which I will probably do.

In the email from admissions they informed us the dress for all of the days except Thursday is casual but just to remember that we’re meeting with professors who are basically deciding our future.  The dress for Thursday is business casual since we’re taking the professional oath that day.  The rest of the schedule for orientation focuses on how to prepare for class, professional development information, Title IX, professionalism, and an overview of what we’re going to be learning throughout our 1L year.  We also have a session dedicated to an intro to legal reasoning, run by our legal writing and research professors. 

For that session, I already have some reading to do!  Two of the articles focus on how to read a legal opinion and how to brief a case, which leads into the assignment to brief a case!  The article about how to read a legal opinion was one that is geared toward 1Ls and can be found here.  I thought it was really helpful as it defined a lot of the words that get thrown around when discussing cases and could be a great help for the future.

Books and Other Fun Stuff

In addition to the orientation schedule, our professors also realized the assignments for the first day.  Unfortunately, I have not received my finalized section but I decided to buy two of my required casebooks as they’re the same for all three of the sections and one class has the same first day assignment for all three.  Additionally, all 1Ls have every class at the same time, with the exception of Legal Writing and Research, so basically all I’m waiting for is which professor I’ll have for each class.

At my school, they are really big into mentoring, which includes peer mentors, alumni mentors, and a whole team of faculty advisors.  I heard from the first of these on Saturday, my upperclassman mentor.  I did a similar thing through the Chemistry department in college and I’m hoping she’ll be able to give me some tips about how to do well in my first year!

Getting all of this information is getting me excited to go to law school but also a little nervous!  I can’t believe what I’ve been dreaming about since the seventh grade is finally coming true!