Orientation Day Three

Curriculum--"the set of studies for a particular period, appointed by a university.”

-Black’s Law Dictionary

Day Three!  The official last day of orientation programming.  Tomorrow is an optional service project, helping to clean up a park in the city.  I’m planning on attending, which means less time to do my first day assignments but I already have a good start so fingers crossed.

Intro to 1L Curriculum

The first session today revolved around learning about what our courses will entail this first semester.  There was a session yesterday with my legal writing and research professors yesterday but today was focused on our major courses; Torts, Civ Pro, and Criminal Law.  One of the things my Torts professor wanted to emphasize was that we shouldn’t lose sight of the big picture of how all of the courses fit together.  In addition to my TA in Legal ARW, I also have four TAs for Civil Procedure, but I’ve heard that people go to TAs for all of their subjects.

Here's my schedule for my first semester of law school!

By now, I have all of the tentative syllabi for my classes.  One of my classes has a midterm and a final; while the other two just have finals.  The midterm is only 10% of my grade but that will hopefully give me insight to how the final will be structured.  Also, in my Crim class, we are required to visit and observe a criminal proceeding.  Even though I’m not really that interested in going into criminal law, it sounds kinda fun to see how that process works in real life.  From what I can see, this semester seems really interesting and designed to definitely immerse us in the world of law.

Diversity and Inclusion Session

The final session of the day focused on diversity and how to work through our natural biases.  It was interesting to hear about how others view the best way of dealing with others who let their biases known.  One of the major points I took away from this session was that in order to have respectful and meaningful discussions in class we need to respect others’ backgrounds and personal beliefs.  Additionally, another big point that was made through the session was that we don’t need to rid ourselves of our own personal biases but learn to navigate them and not use them as a crutch.

Well that’s all for my recaps of my orientation program.  So now it’s back to cracking open my casebooks and getting down to business.  For those of you starting classes on Monday, good luck!  And if you’re just starting orientation next week, have fun with it and definitely take some time for yourself as it’s a little draining.