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dual degrees, Please give insight into your experience completing two degrees within three years.

mydasmarie wrote:Duke dual degrees, Please give insight into your experience completing two degrees within three years. I know the law school lowers the required credits needed slightly to help accommodate the second degree, and the summer start also helps, but how doable is this? Does it interfere with journal involvement/ joining organizations/clubs on campus because of the workload? How difficult was it for you to fit in writing a thesis your 3L year? (I would be completing a Masters, though am considering switching over to an LLM program)

For those attending other law schools but facing a similar situation of juggling two degrees, paint a picture for me of how difficult or manageable it is.

Much thanks for your responses

I am a 1L and I have not yet started my dual degree. It really depends on what degree you are getting. Mine will require me to take 24 credits in addition to my law school credits. My law school requires around 82 I believe. To manage this I will be taking 8 credits this summer and will be doing intersession classes for most of the next two years. At my school it messes with the amount of credits you can take in specific areas (I believe this are ABA rules).I can't take journal for credit because it is not supervised by a professor (I use my 12 credits your are allowed to earn in this category from my other degree). For some reason those 12 also count against the amount of clinic hours I can take so I can only take 8 clinic/internship/externship credits. I don't have to write a thesis. I know I am stressed about scheduling conflicts. My school has two required courses after 1L and I am paranoid I will somehow not be able to take them because of conflicts.

I'm a 2L in Duke JD/LLM. It's a little more work than the typical JD, but it is definitely doable. It's a well-established program with seemingly infinite resources that hundreds (at least) of other students have completed in the past. Almost everyone in from my class in the JD/LLM program is on moot court or a journal or both. Almost everyone is involved in some student organization or another. Many of us are also involved in various activities outside of the law school.

I think most people are finished with the writing requirement by the end of 2L, depending on how much they like writing. It definitely is not burdensome to complete by 3L.