Complete — “Brought to an end.”
-Merriam Webster’s Dictionary
I cannot believe I’m already done
with my 1L year of law school! I hope
everyone else had a great end to the school year and a wonderful beginning of
your summer. Now that this semester is
over and I’ve finally received my grades for the semester, I thought I’d
reflect a little on my first year of law school as a whole.
So I’d first like to say this was
the hardest year of schooling I have ever had and it’s my 19th year
of school. I’m really not saying this to
scare you off of law school; I definitely wouldn’t give it up, but that’s the
truth. All throughout grade school, high
school, and college, I’ve always had homework, quizzes, tests, and papers to
help go over the concepts being taught in the classroom. I’ve also been graded on my own performance
on these things. Well, law school tosses
all of that out of the window. All of
the various evaluations typically given throughout a school year are gone in
law school. Only one exam at the end of
the semester is extremely terrifying and a little misleading. You go throughout the whole semester, keeping
up with reading, but seeing little benefit from your work and then bam!, a
final exam to keep you up at night. Then,
on top of all of the stress that comes with one extensive, arduous exam,
professors don’t even grade you on your own merit, they compare you against
your classmates in what you wrote. So
even if you wrote a great essay on your final, you could still get a low grade
if all of your peers did better than you.
Now, that doesn’t mean I haven’t
enjoyed the experience. This was really
the first year in a long time where I enjoyed all of my classes, even if they
aren’t exactly my thing. As a Chem
major, I took a lot of classes that (1) either bored me to tears or (2) were so
hard that they made me cry on a weekly basis.
Each of my classes this first year had something that really interested
me, even if it wasn’t the whole class.
Now, I’m that annoying person who always says, “Well, from [insert
relevant class here], I know that [insert relevant fact about conversation
here] so I definitely know what I’m talking about.”
My grades as a whole really weren’t
too terrible, but are definitely not at the standard that I’m used to. I had a very high GPA in high school and
college so my law school GPA is lower than my GPAs before. That’s just something that I’m going to have
to get used to and not compare myself to others in my class, which is super
hard since that’s what your professors do.
After this past year I definitely have my ways of reading and outlining
down. There’s one thing I think I still
need to work on, which would be to really focus on the classes that don’t come
as naturally to me, like Con Law or Civil Procedure, instead of others, like
Contracts or classes with professors I really understand their exam style.
Overall, I’m proud of myself for
completing my first year of law school and figuring out my way of tackling
classes! I’m just starting my third week
of my summer internship so a post will be up soon on what I’m doing with my
summer and how it’s going so far!
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