If you have just entering the law school, you should make sure that you can do things well enough. Paving your way towards success in law school is based on common sense. Here are things you should do:
- Read your assignments: There are tons of assignments in law schools and if you want to do your assignments properly, you need to read properly as well. Before doing your assignments, you should read them in their entirety. It is obvious that law school assignments are often not exciting to read. In some cases, reading materials in law schools are downright awful, which is tedious and filled with boring terms. Nonetheless, you should condition yourself to be able to understand any reading material efficiently. If you can do this, you will get an automatic advantage.
- Never fall behind on assignments: This is related to your ability to read and comprehend your assignments. If you can’t do both properly, you will certainly fall behind on assignments. A reading session for each class could be about 50 pages and sometimes more. If you fall behind, those pages may pile up fast and you can’t catch up. When it happens, you will start to skip materials, which will be bad for your grades. If you start to skip things, it will be more difficult to follow along. You rely on present reading material to learn new complicated material later. Luckily, early reading material is relatively comprehensible by new students, so you should take the opportunity to progressively build up your learning capability.
- Stop surfing the net: High speed WiFi access is common in law schools and dorms, so you will be exposed to the Internet quite often. Honestly, no one is immune to the appeal of the Internet, because you can find many exciting and intriguing things on the smartphone or laptop screens. You need to have self discipline to limit the time to look up sports scores, readings news articles, checking social updates and replying to email messages. There’s a myriad of reasons why people access the web and you should do it to support your learning process. You can check latest news about recent legal cases, which you can use as case studies. If you start to procrastinate by accessing irrelevant stuff on the web, your performance in class will surely degrade. You can check sports score and read social updates during weekends, but during the normal study days, you need to limit your online access patterns.
- Make outlines: Making outlines is a common trick for any student. In reality, many students don’t know how to make proper outlines. This is the skill that you need to learn in the high school and if you can’t do it right now, then learn to make proper outlines during the weekends. Some law schools provide Learning Skills program that can help to enhance your performance in class. A good way to do is to read your friend’s outline and try to make something similar on your own, but not by copying it. Read your own reading materials and create effective outlines.