"Everybody's Working For the Weekend..."

Congratulations! You survived the first week of law school. What should you be spending your first weekend doing? Celebrating? Studying? Trying to see if you can still transfer to an M.B.A. program . . .? First and foremost, take a moment to take a deep breath and realize that you made it through the first week, only 16 more to go until Winter Break! Law school is about pacing yourself, so take pride in the fact you have one full week under your belt.

In ASP we recommend that you spend part of the weekend evaluating your performance during your first week of law school. Ask yourself the following questions: How did your reading go? Reading briefs will get easier the more you read, but are you having a hard time finding the rule of law in the brief? Are you confused by the procedural history? Ask yourself, how did your briefs work? If you had been called would you have been able to answer the professors questions using the briefs you prepared? What area of your brief do you need to work on? Make sure to attend the ASP Workshop #1 next week to fine tune your briefing skills. Identifying the areas you need improvement this weekend will help you pinpoint what to focus on during the workshop.  Law school is all about self-assessment and identifying how you can best learn, comprehend, and analyze the law.

We also recommend that you make a study plan or review your current study plan. Make a calendar that breaks up the week, day by day, hour by hour. Include your classes, your commute time, any jobs, family or religious commitments, workout time, etc. This should leave you with a clear view of the hours you have to devote towards reading, briefing, outlining, etc. As you probably are already realizing, you will spend more time reading some subjects than others. Pencil into your calendar when you plan to do reading and briefing for each subject. Realize that your study plan is not set in stone and needs to be constantly evaluated during the first semester. You will need to add in time for outlining, research projects, legal research papers, etc. in the near future. Start to think about where you may be able to plug these tasks into your current study plan.

So, in addition to any studying your new study plan includes this weekend, remember that it’s important to RELAX and maybe even catch up on the sleep you missed over the week.