As spring semester finals rapidly approach, it means it’s time for me to buckle down and finish my outlines. But after that, it will be summer!

As an evening student, that means more of fall and spring semester for me. In the Loyola hybrid program, the summers between the first couple of years are also spent taking classes (albeit, for a condensed eight weeks). This upcoming summer, I will be taking Constitutional Law on Monday and Wednesday nights. I am really excited for this course as I am really interested in civil rights litigation and want to learn more about it. This summer I will also be continuing to work my full-time job as a paralegal.

The benefit of this schedule is that I’m already in a good groove in terms of my weekly schedule, and nothing much will have to change when summer starts. I also still get a break between July 13 (my Con Law final) and the start of my 2nd year fall semester (August 17), so I will still be refreshed before starting with Criminal Law, Property, and Legislation and Regulation.

During that approximate month off from school, I have a two-week long military training, and then I will probably take some time to travel with my family. See you next year!

One piece of advice that I got prior to starting law school was to also use law school as an opportunity to network, and to take advantage of as many opportunities to explore and network as possible. At Loyola, there have been several different opportunities and types of events where I was able to network.

Some of the events were offered through an LLS student organization, such as APALSA (Asian Pacific American Law Students Association). APALSA holds an annual “night market” where people could play games, win prizes, and mingle with students from other law schools and attorneys who were sponsors and/or alumni of APALSA. I was able to talk with a currently practicing tax attorney, a corporate litigation attorney, and I was able to meet students from UCLA, Southwestern, USC, Pepperdine, UC Irvine, and Chapman.

Other events were offered directly from Loyola—such as the First-Year Alumni Mentorship program. In September of last year, I was matched with an alumni mentor who had also gone through the hybrid evening program at Loyola. My alumni mentor and I have been able to connect several times over phone, and she has given me advice on everything from self-care and withstanding pressure to how to get through law school exams. Although I work with attorneys at my job as a paralegal, being able to talk with a currently practicing attorney, who has been through the exact same program I am currently going through, has been invaluable.

Happy Daylight Savings! In honor of this time-based holiday, I wanted to give some insight on what a typical weekday looks like for me as a part-time student, full-time paralegal, and also 24/7 human. As an evening student, I only have classes on Mondays and Wednesdays, and Wednesdays my classes are remote. Here is what my schedule looks like on Wednesdays:

8:00 AM – Wake up, get ready, eat breakfast. Since I work from home, I commute only about 20 feet to my office (the spare bedroom).

8:30 AM – Check my work email, review if any urgent matters need addressing first. If not, I will get started on whatever projects I might be currently working on. This week, I am working on researching and drafting an opposition to a motion to dismiss and preparing a post-trial fee petition, both of which are projects that will take me a good chunk of time.

12:00 PM – Break time! I usually take a walk with my dog, Rain, and eat a quick lunch. If I haven’t already, I will meal-prep my dinner for the night.

1:00 PM – Back to work.

5:00 PM – I’m done for the day (with work). I will usually go to the gym and try to get in a quick 30-minute cardio workout.

5:45 PM – Heat up my meal that I meal-prepped.

6:00 PM – Torts (remotely) begins. In the spring semester, on Wednesdays I only have Torts and Civil Procedure. In the fall, on Wednesdays I had Contracts and Legal Writing. I am usually eating my dinner during class.

7:00 PM – Torts ends, I have a 15-minute break.

7:15 PM – Civ Pro starts. This is the longest class for the night so I usually have to be snacking to keep my energy up during it.

9:00 (ish) PM – Our Civ Pro professor usually gives us a 5-10 minute break in the middle of class to break up the 2.5 hour-long class.

9:45 PM – Classes are done for the day!

Happy Valentine’s Month! In this month celebrating “love,” I’ve had a chance to reflect on what I “love” about Loyola and my time here so far. I came from a huge public university where resources were scarce, and time and space and class spots were always a battle. Coming from a school where class sizes of 500+ were typical, being able to have significant face-time with my professors and an overabundance of resources available to me has made me very appreciative of Loyola.

During the fall semester, when I was not able to attend office hours due to work or personal conflicts, I was able to make a separate appointment with my professors as needed. When I was not sure if my computer would be compatible with the exam software for my Contracts midterm, I was able to email someone and get an answer the same day. There is also an abundance of academic success resources available at Loyola Law School, including one-on-one appointments with “writing specialists” who will help coach you through legal writing and office hours with upper-year students who have been exactly where I was only a couple years ago.

What I love the most about Loyola, however, is that they understand that if you are in the hybrid evening program it means you are probably working full time or have other competing obligations. Therefore, resources are offered remotely, at off-hours, and with busy schedules in mind. There is a clear thoughtfulness and willingness to accommodate amongst the faculty and fellow students which helps add to my sense of community.

One thing that I heard a lot about prior to coming to law school was the importance of study groups, which I initially half dismissed and half scoffed at because when I was in undergrad (and even in high school) I absolutely HATED group work.

However, study groups have been indeed essential to ensuring I have been able to get through law school.

Before my Contracts midterm, one of my study group buddies (who commutes to school from Burbank) and I (I drive in from Irvine) had a three-hour long phone call where we went over our professor’s practice problems and talked through our analysis. Prior to my fall semester final exams, I hosted my friends over at my apartment a couple different times. We ordered pizza, went over practice problems, and talked through our outlines. I truly believe that these study sessions were the key to my success during exam season.

Law school exam questions (and therefore, law school overall) require different perspectives. You have to be able to attack questions from multiple angles and consider different arguments. For the evening program specifically, my study partners work for immigration advocacy groups, for huge entertainment groups, for tax and accountancy firms, etc. In other words, my friends not only bring their unique personal and cultural backgrounds but also have rich professional experience which elevates their thought process.

My study partners have helped me stay accountable by motivating me to get through more practice problems than I might have otherwise. They have talked me off the ledge when I started going down a rabbit hole when I was struggling through the “self-defense” aspect of intentional torts. Perhaps most importantly, law school is not an experience that you can get through alone, especially if you are simultaneously still working full-time. My friends I have met at Loyola have been an incredible balm for my mental health and general sanity. We vent to each other about law school stress, work-life balance, and they understand my current stressors like nobody else does. I think that’s why even though I didn’t really get the importance of study groups prior to starting law school, I’ve come to rely on my study group a lot to get through my time in law school.

Happy New Year! The dreaded question I got the most over winter break was “How did exams go?” My standard response was . . . “Well, they went.” 

I admit, I do exaggerate a little. All in all, exams did not go bad at all. As an evening student, I only had two exams – a Torts midterm and a Contracts final, and they were both spaced a week a part so I had time to shift my focus from Torts to Contracts without my head feeling like it was spinning too much. 

As soon as my exams were over, however, I had a different reason for staying up late and keeping busy – the law firm I work for has been gearing up for a trial that starts in mid-January. Pretrial deadlines (such as the filing of motions in limine, which is when a party requests that the Court order that none of the parties are allowed to use a certain piece of evidence at trial, usually arguing that the evidence in question is prejudicial and/or irrelevant to the case) had started during my law school finals and continued up until New Year’s Eve. So a majority of my holiday break was spent in front of my computer, preparing filings and refreshing PACER. Fun! 

But – despite the less than ideal timing, there is nothing quite like the adrenaline of preparing for trial. After literal years of cooking on a case, trial is the ultimate culmination of all your efforts. This case that I am working on in particular is close to my heart because it is the first ever case I ever worked on – I listened in on the intake on my first day as a paralegal and three years later we are heading to trial to get a final resolution on behalf of our clients. 

This isn’t my first trial – I was able to assist on a different one a year ago – but back then I did not have the rich legal context that my first semester at Loyola provided me. The res ipsa loquitur jury instruction would have just looked like gibberish to 2024 Jae, but 2026 Jae has a semester of Torts under her belt and is now able to actually follow along with what is happening. 

Before I started law school, the prospect of being cold called completely terrified me. What could be worse than being publicly humiliated in front of fifty of your peers? Then, I was cold called during law school orientation. I had thought that I would at least be safe because classes had not started yet.

The first time was like ripping a band-aid off. And, to be fair, the question was a fairly obvious one that I was able to answer. Still, my face definitely flushed. My palms got sweaty. I heard my heartbeat thudding in my ears. The consensus that cold calling feels awful when it happens to you I would agree is true. BUT – here are some further truths about cold calling that I think are important to know:

• The first time is the worst time. Every time after that it gets easier and easier.
• Professors understand that you realistically cannot be prepared every single day for every single class. All of my professors this semester offered some sort of way to opt out of being cold called on for that day with no penalty on your overall grade (as long as you didn’t abuse the system, which nobody did).
• Nobody remembers when you answer “wrong” during a cold call except for you. Everyone in your class is too busy trying to stay afloat themselves and trying to make sure they are prepared if they are called on to worry about what you may or may not have said.
• Finally, cold calling helps you learn. I would say this is more of a perspective than a “truth” per se, but the fact is that if you know it’s possible for a professor to ask you a question at any time, you know you have to be sufficiently prepared (aka, do the readings!) and you have to be following along with the discussion and lecture in class. OK – I know I kind of sound like a teacher’s pet right now, but it’s true! There is a reason why the Socratic method and cold calling is practiced in all law schools across the country. It’s because it works. Even removing the cold calling aspect, if you approach every class prepared to participate, you will learn better. If I can’t sell it to you that way, how about this: if you are paying attention during class, you won’t have to re-watch the recorded lectures later, which gives you back all of that time.

To conclude, I agree that cold calling can be stressful. But I think the myth is that cold calling should be stressful. In reality, if you approach your classes with an open mind, let yourself be okay with making mistakes, and just know it will help you learn, being cold called on is not so bad.

Hello Reader! I’m Jae Wakeling, a 1E in the Loyola Law School Hybrid Evening Program.

A little background about me – I grew up in Santa Clarita and went to UC Berkeley for undergrad. I graduated in 2021 with a BA in Economics and a minor in Public Policy.

After graduation, I moved to Fort Drum, NY to be with my now-husband and I lived there for nearly five years. My first job out of college was as a profitability analyst for a foodservice company (think – a company that sells food and supplies to restaurants). I left that after a year to become a paralegal and fell in love with it. I’ve been a civil litigation paralegal for over three years now, and have worked all types of cases from car accidents to complex Constitution violation claims. I am also an Army Reservist, and have been since 2023. In 2024, my husband and I moved back to Southern California and I started preparing and applying to law schools.

I chose Loyola Law School because it offered the best part-time program that would allow me to continue to work while studying to become an attorney. The hybrid program gives me financial and time flexibility while still being a super rigorous program.

After law school, my dream job is to clerk and eventually I hope to become a litigator, but I am still deciding between civil and criminal law.

Last month, all of my free time (and some of the time I probably should have been outlining) was devoted to watching the Dodgers. However, now that I’ve been left bereft due to the off-season, I am watching movies, hanging with my dog Rain, or baking.