This Is the Sound of Studying

Two and half weeks until finals!

I was told by many people that the atmosphere around the law school would get really stressful as finals approached. I can't say that I sense that yet, though for a couple weeks now, there's been an undercurrent of unease as I suspect that many 1L's are beginning to freak out in private.

I think a lot of the stress has to do with the fact that 100% of our grade is based on the final. No midterms, no papers, no quizzes. If your first year in law school really is like drinking out of a fire hose, how is one supposed to study for such a beast?

It turns out there are a lot of different ways to tackle the massive amounts of material that they throw at us. The most popular way to do it is with outlines: 10- to 30-page pieces of academic flotsam filled with nuggets of knowledge. Essentially, we take everything we've learned the entire semester, boil it down to the important stuff, then put it down in bullet-point form.

At the beginning of the semester, lots of 2Ls and 3Ls were telling us to start early- as much as a month and a half before finals. I, in my infinite wisdom, decided to wait a little bit and start... this weekend. It turns out that the combined experience of 2Ls and 3Ls contains more wisdom than I initially thought. Outlines take a really really long time to work on. I spent this entire past weekend working on my Contracts outline, and I only got through a third of the course.

Of course, I could just do the easy thing and buy commercial outlines, but much of the learning actually comes from writing the outline yourself. Alternatively, I could opt not to outline at all and use my undergrad studying strategy (wait until a few days before the final then cram- really bad idea), but where's the fun in that? If you're the type that learns by doing stuff (whether it be taking notes or talking it out with a friend), then outlining is definitely one of the better ways to help you get as much out of the proverbial fire hose as you can.