Desert Fox wrote:rayiner wrote:thexfactor wrote:What is the biggest difference between college and ls?
Also, do you think the difference between HS and college is greater or less than the difference between college and law school?
Thanks
Law school is actually hard.
Ray can you compare engineering undergrad with law school. Obviously the material is pretty different, but I'd like to hear your insights.
The studying process is somewhat different. We covered 100 pages in my aeroelasticity book, but 400-500 in each of my substantive classes. Obviously reading cases goes a lot faster. The material is easier to understand, but there is more of it. It's less frustrating sometimes --- you don't usually struggle over a case for an hour and make no progress like you might with a problem set.
The work load is more regular. I'd stay up late at night working on problem sets, but very rarely stayed up late in law school except a couple of days for legal writing assignments. The total amount probably averages out to be the same as a solid semester of engineering classes (eg: freshman year weed-out courses). Finals week was probably less stressful than senior design project. For the former, I spent a couple of weeks in the library staying up really late each night, but for the latter it was more like four weeks in the library but still getting 7-8 hours of sleep each night.
I thought the engineering mindset was tremendously useful in law school. Engineering just ingrains a lot of habits into your mindset that come in tremendously useful in law school. Supporting every assertion you make with facts or analysis, hitting every element of a claim even if they seem obvious, showing every step of a chain of reasoning (like a derivation) even if they seem obvious, carefully distinguishing between different analytical modes, analyzing orthogonal things separately, keeping track of whether the assumptions that underly a previous analysis still apply when you apply the resulting rules to a new problem, etc.
The one proviso is that you have to get out of the mindset of there being "one right answer". I know some engineers in my class who got into the mindset of "there is the right answer, and you just apply the rules to find it". This isn't a particularly good mindset even in engineering. It's more like "there are alternatives, and you use the rules to evaluate each one and find a result that optimizes some factor you're interested in".