In only one week, I will be entering the first semester of my 2L year. I’m excited, nervous, and feeling a little apprehensive to go back to school after having such a great summer at work and with friends. I thought it might be a fun idea to do a blog post on what my upcoming semester looks like and the goals I’m setting for myself. Then at the end of the semester, I can follow up with a reflection including whether I met my goals, things I learned, etc.
My Schedule
Alright let’s get right into it with my schedule! First things first, I am staying at my job as a law clerk from the summer, just with limited hours. I was working around 40 hours/week during the summer, but this is going to be cut in half for 20 hours/week during the school year until summer rolls around again. I am also keeping my job as a Yoga Sculpt instructor, but I only teach one class a week on Thursday afternoons, so that’s not too demanding. (If you’re in the Twin Cities area and need a good studio recommendation, feel free to email me for info!!)
Okay with work out of the way, let’s get into classes. Above all else this semester, I wanted to participate in a clinic. I want to wait to do an extended blog post on law school clinics until I finish mine so I can give really good insight, but I can tell you about my school’s application process in the meantime. I want to say I applied in March or April by submitting my resume and a personal statement for each clinic I was interested in. My law school only lets 2L and 3L students participate in clinics, so there’s no stress of trying to fit one in during your first year. I will say that a few of my peers weren’t even aware of the clinic application deadline, which is why it’s very important to make sure you’re reading your law school’s newsletter to stay up to date on that info!! After a few weeks, we heard back from the clinics we got into (if any) and had a really quick turn around time on letting them know if we were accepting our spot for the following semester. This can be scary, but the clinics are very competitive so it has to move fast.
The clinic I ended up enrolling in is called the Community Justice Project. It’s a one semester, 6 credit clinic (oofta) that “focuses on bridge building with community stakeholders and problem solving in distressed communities.” – I stole that quote directly from my law school’s website lol. I was so excited when I got picked for this clinic because it reflects everything I care about and is so heavily integrated with civil rights, public policy, and providing legal assistance to communities with limited resources. I also love that it’s 6 credits, because I didn’t have to stress myself out with trying to fill in credits with a bunch of classes. My biggest concern with this clinic is balancing my workload between it and my current job. I’ll probably be spending 20 hours/week on each, so I’m going to make sure that I really hone in on my calendar organization! But mostly, I’m very excited.
I also get one credit for being on one of my law school’s journals, which is very cool. My law school has two journals, one is the regular flagship journal, similar to most law schools’ “law reviews.” The other one is the Journal of Law and Public Policy. This is the one that I’ll be doing. For both journals, students had to go through a write-on competition. This was about 2 weeks after finals ended, and when I say it sucked, it suckedddd. Every student in the competition had to write a ~10 page memo, bluebook check a lengthy law review article, and correct citations on a third document. It took me so long and there were many times that I thought about throwing in the towel, but then I reminded myself how badly I wanted to participate in a law journal since before I ever really knew what it meant! And again, I will do a lengthier post on this, but I don’t know much about it yet so I think it’s best to save that for later.
Okay with my clinic and journal credits out of the way, I am also enrolled in 3 classes: Lawyering Skills III (pretty much just legal research and writing), Accounting for Lawyers, and an online Compliance course. In total, I’m taking 14 credits, which I think is pretty average for 2L students, if not on the lower end. I’m usually the type of student who wants to frontload my credits so I never have to stress about having enough to graduate later, but between working, clinic work, and my other commitments, I figured that I need to make sure I’m not overextending myself credit-wise. The classes I chose were honestly just kind of random. Lawyering Skills III is required for all 2Ls to take, so I knew I wanted to do that right away, but the other two just gave me more flexibility, which is why I’m taking them. I only have to be at school Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, which is huge. This way I can work a full 8 hours at my job Wednesdays and Fridays and just make up the last 4 hours between the other days! I also love the idea of an online course, because I self-motivate pretty well and like not being tied down to a specific slot in my schedule to get things done for a class.
The last thing I have in my schedule is the Minnesota Justice Foundation. One of my best law school friends and I are going to be Co-Presidents of our school’s chapter this year, which is terrifying but I also cannot wait. I (again) don’t really know what this entails yet, but this summer I’ve been working on planning events for the fall semester and getting set up to table at the 1L orientation next week. I think we’re going to plan on having only one meeting a month along with whatever events we’re doing, but it’s definitely something I need to keep track of given my commitment!!
My Goals
This blog post is honestly more beneficial for me than anyone else, but I also think it can still be helpful to kind of get a look inside of a current law student’s mind when planning out a semester. So after going over my upcoming schedule, I want to get into my goals and things I’m going to hold myself to in order to try to be as ~balanced~ as possible while also pushing myself.
I. Calendar Everything
I don’t wanna dive too deep into this because I feel so repetitive with how much I talk about calendaring, but I think that should also signal how important it is. This goal never really changes for me. I put everything into my calendar. When I go to the gym, when I study, when I have classes, anytime I have plans with friends, etc. etc. So this goal is mostly just about staying consistent with habits I already have formed.
II. Weekly Check-Ins
Sometimes I get so into a routine that I don’t want to change anything. I choose something and then I stick to it, no questions asked. But this isn’t always a good thing. I think being able to make yourself face what is working/what isn’t working is important, so I am making a goal of doing weekly check-ins with myself.
This is probably going to be pretty informal, but I like the idea of just dedicating maybe 20 minutes each week towards actually going over the previous week in my head and writing down what I liked about it/what didn’t go the way I wanted. And then if there’s anything I can do to change the things I didn’t like, I will try to implement that going forward.
III. Communicate!!
This is my biggest one for sure. Whether it’s communicating with professors, my friends, family, work, etc. – I need to be sure I am not spreading myself too thin and if I need to cancel something/reschedule or whatever, I should be talking to someone about that. At the end of the day, and I’ve said this before, the people in your life want to see you succeed. As long as you’re open and honest about your current commitments and things going on in your life, people won’t be mad at you.
I wanted to put this one last too because I think the other two are the first steps I should take. If I have a solid schedule I make for myself, that’s the foundation. And then I can kind of move things around if needed. And only if that doesn’t work will I reach out for some assistance or advice from the people in my life to let them know how I’m feeling. I also want to be a person that others can go to for advice, but keeping an open line of communication is a two-way street.
And that’s it! Hopefully this provided at least a little insight into a law student’s semester. I’m already excited for December, when I can come back here and follow up on how everything went and hopefully have a lot more to say on clinics, law journals, student orgs, etc.
Law Student Balance 