sayan wrote:
Did you by any chance use any supplements or 3rd-party outlines during your semester? I suppose you studied around the clock?
No supplements or outlines. I outlined everything from scratch at the end of the semester. I guess I could give you more details about my study method, although I tend to think that doing what seems natural to you is the best approach.
Like I said, the bulk of my "studying" was just doing all the readings and preparing for class (i.e., glancing over the readings right before). You’ll probably be surprised at how many people end up not doing that.
While reading, I tended to make "book briefs" - just jotting the holding and a few facts in the margins of my casebooks. I also underlined everything I found salient, but no highlighting/color-coding (that just isn't my style). At first, I was doing full typed notes on all my readings, but that lasted less than a month.
For my toughest class (CivPro, also the last exam), I started studying for real a few weeks before classes ended. By then, all your activities are pretty much over or at least winding down, so there's some time to study. For CivPro, I probably overprepared, but I ended up re-reading everything that'd I'd underlined (and I'm a pretty liberal underliner) and making more thorough notes; what I would call an "outline." But, for me, all that was was a typed copy of the miniature briefs I'd made. For that class, I also briefed cases that were just mentioned in the notes after the primary cases, which probably isn't necessary.
Right before finals (like, the couple of dead days you get before finals), I started doing similar things as I'd done for CivPro for my other classes. I continued studying CivPro right to the end, though. Two of my exams were take-home (you get 8 hours to do them), so I didn't study nearly as hard for those. Nonetheess, I spent approximately 14 hours per day studying (productively, with the internet off) each day for the five days or so before exams started, and then kind of tapered down as exams started (you have like two weeks over which 4 exams are spread out, and I actually finished studying early).
Also, I at least outlined answers to every exam question available for each of my profs for the previous 1-4 years (depending on availability of exams). For my timed tests (3 hours), I also went ahead and sat for that amount of time to actually take one of those tests for each of those two classes. I also tested the crap out of the exam software we used, which surprisingly a lot of people didn’t do, which meant that they ran into computer problems during the actual tests.
I also met with a little study group one time, which was good to go over practice exam answers, but definitely not entirely necessary. To be honest, it was probably more like a boost to my ego – yes, I know this at least as well as some of the people in my class. For that reason, I’d recommend that you not seek out the people who really seem to know everything, because I think that can be an ego-deflator; look for people who are on your level.
Basically, my primary advice is to keep up during the school year, and you should be okay. Either that or I had tremendous luck, because I don’t necessarily feel like I worked much harder for the end-of-term studying than some people who were disappointed by their grades.
Anyway, enough procrastinating. I hope some of my “wisdom” may be helpful to somebody. Good luck everyone.
Reasons?
On the bright side, a Harvard JD is a pretty versatile degree so I'm sure if you have other talents you can leverage them to exit the legal industry per se.
