Fall Semester Update

My first semester of law school has truly passed by in the blink of an eye. This, however, also means that finals are fast approaching (ahhh!).

Three months into law school, and I can honestly say law school hasn’t been as stress-inducing as I expected it to be (although I’m sure that I’ll be singing an entirely different tune once exams are less than a week away). I think that I built up such a scary image of law school during orientation that once I experienced the real thing, it could only be…well, less scary.

I think a big part of what has made the experience vastly different from the image I had created in my mind is how, at Loyola, you’re really not thrown in at the deep end. I know I mentioned it in my last blog post, but the classes American Legal Research & Writing and Introduction to American Law have really eased my transition into law school. In the former, the first few classes were spent going over the basics of how to study, how to research (very, very helpful), how exams are graded, and how to create a good study outline. The remainder was spent polishing our legal writing.

In the latter, we covered several “core” subjects of American law, ranging from the history of the Constitution to contract law. Moreover, we often discussed current events and how they pertained to what we studied (and to be fair, 2020 has been an extremely eventful year, so there were a lot of things to talk about).

I will be quite sad when these two classes come to an end, but I am also looking forward to what next semester has to offer! I have signed up for some substantive law classes this time around, and am excited to put the skills and knowledge I have learned during this semester to use. I do want to mention that even when picking courses, LLM students were guided through the process: at the end of October, we were given the opportunity to have a 1 on 1 appointment with the LLM advisor in order to discuss our goals and what courses we had in mind.

On a different note, my sleep schedule has never been worse (okay, that’s a lie, it definitely has been a lot worse, but it’s still pretty bad). I don’t know why I thought law school would be the magic fix I needed to finally find the willpower to go to sleep at a reasonable hour, because I am no closer to being an early riser than I was prior to coming to Loyola. Also, the fact that all of my classes are in the evening has certainly not motivated me to begin my day any earlier.