Law School Academic Support Blog

Remembering Who You Are and What You Want to Become

Many of our students have always been the top of the heap in public education and later college and graduate education. In law school, they find themselves with a group of colleagues who are equally bright and equally successful. Add to that the differences in the law classroom, new forms of analysis and writing, and the most common one-grade-per-course testing method. The result is that some first-semester students can get overwhelmed pretty quickly if they have not spent some reflection time before arriving at law school..

Preparing for your first semester (and reminding yourself if you are an upper-division law student) is essential to your well-being. The preparation you need to do is to spend some time thinking about you and your choices.

Take out a sheet of paper and divide it into columns: values, abilities, areas for improvement,  resources.

In the values column, list things that you value about yourself, life, and others. Include values also that caused you to choose law as a profession. Your values will keep you centered as you study the law. There will be people's opinions, case outcomes, methods of legal analysis, etc. that may not mesh with your values. When confronted with those different views, you have a better chance of evaluating those other perspective while staying grounded in your own values if you already know what you value and why those values are important to you.

In the abilities column, list the things that you know you are talented at in all areas of your life - academic, relationships, spiritual, hobbies, etc. Do not expect perfection in yourself or pretend to be perfect. Make an honest appraisal of what you do well. You will want to build on those abilities while you adapt to the study of law and interact with colleagues who may seem to "get it" faster than you do. Education is about developing our abilities further and meeting any challenges with adaptability.  Recognize you talent base that will be your starting point and foundation.

In the room for improvement column, list the things that you know you can do better if you allow yourself to increase your knowledge and skills and take constructive criticism. Your abilities may overlap on this list, but it may also indicate improvement for other aspects. For example, you may write well for traditional writing but need to learn how to write legally; you may need to improve your listening skills rather than automatically debating everything; you may work quickly but need to slow down to catch details; you may be a procrastinator and need to use your time more effectively. Law school will challenge you to improve on what you can already do, learn new ways of doing things, and stretch yourself academically and personally.

In the fourth column, list the resources in your life that help you when you become unsure of yourself or discouraged. These resources are family and friends who are your cheerleaders, mentors you go to for advice, the religious mentors for your spiritual beliefs, positive lifestyle choices (sleep, nutrition, exercise), and other positive resources that help you tackle problems and relieve stress and anxiety. Then add to your list the resources that your law school has available for you when you have questions and concerns: professors with office hours, perhaps 1L teaching assistants, the office of academic support programs, librarians, student affairs staff, available counselors, and more. By adding your resources to the list, you are reminded that you are not in law school without support. You are not going it alone.

Keep your list handy throughout your three years. Add, modify, and delete items as appropriate over time. You will grow as a person, a student, a citizen, and a professional lawyer during the three years. Be ready to embrace experiences and become the very best new lawyer you can be for your clients when you graduate.  (Amy Jarmon)

 

 

ASP Position at UNLV Boyd School of Law

The William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas invites applications for Assistant Director, Academic Success Program, William S. Boyd School of Law, Search # 15476. 

UNLV is a comprehensive research university of approximately 28,000 students and 2,900 faculty and staff dedicated to teaching, research, and service. The university has internationally recognized programs in hotel administration and creative writing; professional degrees in law, architecture, and dental medicine; and leading programs in fine arts, sciences and education. UNLV is located on a 332-acre main campus and two satellite campuses in dynamic Southern Nevada. For more information, visit us on-line at: http://www.unlv.edu. 

Reporting to the Director of the Academic Success Program and the Dean for Student Affairs, responsibilities include counseling students in order to assist students with their legal studies, monitoring and training student mentors, assisting in curriculum development for the first year and bar passage programs, and counseling current students and alumni on bar passage issues. 

A competitive applicant for the Assistant Director of the Academic Success Program position must have excellent writing and editing skills, a strong ability to counsel and mentor students, superior public speaking skills, very strong grades and a Juris Doctor from an ABA-approved law school, and membership in a state's bar. Prior academic support experience (either professional or as part of a graduate or law school program) or teaching experience (i.e., legal writing or comparable teaching experience in writing and analytical skills training) is preferred. 

Salary competitive with those at similarly situated institutions. Position is contingent upon funding. 

Submit a letter of interest, a detailed resume listing qualifications and experience, and the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of at least three professional references who may be contacted. Applicants should fully describe their qualifications and experience, with specific reference to each of the minimum and preferred qualifications because this is the information on which the initial review of materials will be based. 

Although this position will remain open until filled, review of candidates' materials will begin on July 13 and best consideration will be gained for materials submitted prior to that date. Materials should be addressed to Professor Jennifer Carr, Search Committee Chair, and are to be submitted via on-line application at https://hrsearch.unlv.edu. For assistance with UNLV's on-line applicant portal, contact UNLV Employment Services at (702) 895-3504 or [email protected].

Application Information

Contact:	Employment Services Human Resources University of Nevada Las Vegas
Online App. Form:	https://hrsearch.unlv.edu/

More Information on University of Nevada Las Vegas

• Institutional Profile
• Current openings for University of Nevada Las Vegas on HigherEdJobs.
• UNLV's Home Page

Friends and Family: Common Bar Exam Issues and How to Deal With Them:

Some suggestions for friends and family supporting someone through the bar exam.

Bar Taker:  I’m going to fail.

Wrong:  Keep up that negative attitude and you certainly will fail.

Right:  You are a brilliant, wonderful, hard-working person who is going to win the bar exam!

 

Bar Taker:  I’m getting fat/so out of shape.

Wrong:  You do look a little fluffy. And your clothes are a little tight. You need to work out.

Right:  No you’re not.  You look fantastic. In fact, your arms are so buff from lugging around all those commercial outline books it looks like you’ve been doing Crossfit.

 

Bar Taker:  sniffing the air around him/her Do I smell?

Wrong:  You don’t smell but that t-shirt you’ve worn for 3 days in a row sure does, and I could fry okra with all the grease from your hair.

Right:  You sure do! You smell like someone who is going to pass the bar exam.

 

Bar Taker:  My house/apartment/room is such a mess.

Wrong:  Funny you should say that.  I just submitted an audition tape to Hoarders.

Right:  You poor dear!  Please let me help you. You go to the library and study while I clean up.

 

Bar Taker: Ugh.  I am absolutely exhausted from studying all day.

Wrong:  Studying all day?  You’ve got to be kidding. Tweeting and posting on Facebook about studying is not the same as actually studying.

Right:  Studying like that is just so draining. You just relax right here on the couch and let me wait on you for the rest of the evening.

 

Bar Taker:  I’m just so stressed.  I can’t do this anymore.

Wrong:  Stressed?  You think this is stressful?  Insert one of the following:

Mother- Try being in labor for 36 hours like I was with you. Now that is stress.

Sibling- You are such a big baby.  No wonder Mom loves me best.

Significant other- Stress is trying to deal with you and your incessant whining.  By the way, I’m breaking up with you.

Right:  I cannot even begin to fathom the amount of stress you are dealing with.  This is the most difficult experience anyone has had to go through.  Ever.  Let me make an appointment for you to get a massage.  My treat.

(KSK)

Welcome to ASP!

Please welcome Cyrah Khan as Associate Director of Academic Support at Seattle University School of Law where she assumed ASP duties this winter. She grew up in New York and became interested in education during high school when she started tutoring at-risk kids in NYC public schools. After moving to Seattle to pursue a Criminal Justice degree at Seattle University, she attended Seattle University School of Law and started doing work in education equity and access to education.  She has worked for the US Department of Education Office for Civil Rights and the ACLU Education Equity Program.  Most recently, she clerked at Division Two of the Washington Court of Appeals.  While clerking she earned her Master's Degree in Education with a focus on differentiated instruction and program assessment.

Please welcome Cyrah to ASP!

Get Your Head in the Game!

I love sports. I love to play sports, coach sports, and watch sports. Studying for the bar exam is like playing a sport, coaching a sport, and watching a sport. There are highs and lows, agonies and defeats, and setbacks and triumphs. Bar review for many law school grads has been in full force for a couple of weeks. The foggy haze of transition from law student to bar student has lifted. Now, it is time for bar students to get their heads in the game.

Like preparing for a sport, you must look at your bar preparation as you would a training schedule. You cannot swim the 500 meters, score the winning goal, or finish the race without focused, incremental, and structured training. Bar review is just that. Everyone says, "Bar prep is a marathon, not a sprint."

During your bar prep, you want to get high scores on MBEs, ace the essays, and finish the performance test with time to spare. However, this is usually far from the realities of your initial phase of bar prep. You have not fully memorized the law or mastered your test taking skills at the beginning of bar prep. However, you are laying the foundation. And, it is this foundation that will get to you game day.

Here are a few ideas to consider as you prepare for game day:

• Map out the remaining subjects that you need to review and the tasks that you need to complete. Writing this out can help you manage your stress and your work load.
• Set realistic goals for each day (or each hour). Meeting goals helps propel you over the next hurdle, builds your confidence, and shows you that you can win this!
• Give yourself time to process the information that is being thrown at you. Do not expect that you will know everything after listening to a lecture and completing 30 multiple choice questions. Bar review is a process, trust in the process.
• Make time for breaks. If you schedule a break, it is not considered procrastination. Everyone needs down time and it is important that you balance your intense study schedule with sufficient time to refresh.
• Evaluate your work. It is important to understand what you are doing right and what you still need to work on. This will help you refocus your time and prioritize improving your weaker areas.
• Play a sport or watch a sporting event (Women's World Cup perhaps). This may give you the inspiration to help you keep your head in the bar review game.

(LBY)

Becoming more detailed-oriented, or not, because it's all circumstantial

Yesterday evening I received a two sentence email from a student asking for advice on how to become a more detailed-oriented person because she is struggling in an internship, and she cites her big-picture orientation as a significant contributor to her struggle. As a member of the constantly connected gadget-net generation I read this email on my phone, and immediately began composing a list of free association ideas to help the student "fix" the problem while resisting the urge to comment further on the missing detail of a signature so that I would know who was asking the question. But I stopped myself from hitting send on that response, rationalizing the decision as "well, that's not what a detail-oriented person would do" and "do you really know what you're talking about because you're about to try to answer a really complicated question via smartphone email."

Today my time in the office has included internet searching for collective advice about becoming more detail-oriented. I also searched for inventories out there to assess comparative detail-orientation because maybe this student is generally sufficient at detail-orientation but is just working for a hyper-perfectionist. There have also been a few minutes where I'm wondering if maybe I am spending too much time attending to omitted details. And thinking that maybe I should be writing a post about productive-procrastination instead. But really, all of this has led me back to the free association list I drafted last night. While it lacked a certain amount of detail, it was probably a good starting place for this student if she is serious about changing her habits of thought and becoming a more detail-oriented person. The student is having a crisis moment and probably wants a list of concrete actions and just needs an immediate starting place to feel some relief as soon as possible. But, I personally would much rather provide the map of cognitive restructuring this student can follow to experience long term relief several months or years down the road. 

Habit change requires sustained effort, particularly when we are seeking to change dominant preferences that have become entrenched through repeated practice. For the next few sentences, I'm going to assume that there is a documented and empirically validated scale of detail and big-picture orientation that exist on a continuum like extroversion and introversion on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. People who live at the extreme ends of the spectrum between detail and big-picture orientation are going to struggle during the first phases of new habit development because these new thought habits will start out as exercises of the imagination since there is limited personal experience with the non-preferred thought habits. Indeed, it may require finding someone who has the desired habits and is willing to demonstrate them to begin developing context of where change in the thought process needs to start. The closer to the middle of the spectrum someone is indicates fluency which allows them to adopt the set of habits that is most suited to the task at hand. 

The concrete behaviors someone with strong big-picture preference can adopt to initiate change generally fall into a broad category of systems of accountability such as to-do lists, reminder programs on phone and computer, accountability partners, workflow checklists, create automatic detail inclusion when available (e.g. email signature blocks), etc. The concrete behaviors that someone who is strongly detail-oriented can implement is scheduled times for reflection on the big picture, a list of big picture assessment questions to use during those scheduled times, and assessment of the priority level of the project because perfectionism and detail-orientation are at least cousins, if not siblings or the same thing.

I will now reply to the student and provide the list I drafted last night, links to a couple of worthwhile online resources, and an invitation to meet and discuss in greater detail. In these circumstances that's probably the best approach for this student. But if I'm wrong, she'll know she can come back and help me find a better way to help her. (CMB)

Delaying the Bar Exam?

Should we encourage grads to delay taking the bar exam if we think that they will not pass on their first attempt? This is a very sensitive topic and aspects of which are currently being litigated in Arizona. Those of us who are overseeing bar preparation can easily understand the thinking behind what is happening in Arizona. We work with very diverse groups of students and we know their likelihood of success on the bar exam hinges upon several factors.

Some students are working full time as they study for the bar; some are caring for an elder or young child; and some struggled throughout law school and barely graduated. Others are less motivated to put in the necessary time to pass the bar with a traditional 8-10 week preparation window. We also understand that some students will greatly benefit from taking some time off between law school graduation and studying for the bar exam.

Because we know most of our students so well, we are keenly aware of particular students who are unlikely to pass on their first attempt (due to any number of reasons). Thus, does this mean that we should discourage them from sitting for the bar this summer? Personally, I have grappled with this notion. However, I have heard of other Professors, Law Schools, and ASPers who often dissuade (and possibly entice with incentives) grads into delaying their bar examinations.

Unless I have been directly asked by a grad for my professional opinion, I wrestle with whether it is my place to influence their decision to sit for or delay sitting for the bar exam. However, when you work so closely with grads during their bar preparation, we do not just think that they may not pass; instead, we often know that they will not pass. Bar exam performance can be predicted when you look at several factors and data points. When I have access to their scores throughout bar review, especially their simulated exams, I can predict with a high level of accuracy their performance on the actual bar exam.

Does this mean that I should encourage delaying the exam? This is the very issue I grapple with. On the one hand, when I know that they will likely fail the exam, encouraging them to wait means they do not have to experience the shame and defeat associated with failing the bar. We also know that once a student has failed the bar exam, passing it becomes a bigger psychological and emotional challenge. (As if it could be more psychologically challenging.) Dissuading them from sitting, also means that bar passage statistics will likely be more favorable for my law school; thus, the dilemma. Because of the current state of affairs in legal education, law employment, and law school admissions, bar passage matters. It matters more now than ever. Therefore, there is no easy answer. 

(LBY)

New England Consortium of Academic Support Professionals - Conference -12/7/2015

“Changing Students, Evolving Roles for ASP”

2015 Conference

New England Consortium of

Academic Support Professionals

 December 7, 2015

New England Law| Boston

Boston, Massachusetts

 Please join us as we tackle issues surrounding our new challenges as academic support professionals in light of the changing student body. 

We will address topics such as increased promotion of formative assessment, our positions on academic standing issues and grading, and what we are doing to support the influx of students who are scoring lower on LSAT and GPA scales.

&

Opportunities to Present Scholarly Works in Progress

(Call for proposals coming in August)

Registration Fee complimentary

For those traveling to Boston, we are happy to provide details on accommodations and assistance with travel arrangements. 

Please contact Professor Lisa Freudenheim,  [email protected], NECASP Chairperson, by email or at (617)422-7366 with any questions.

(Myra Orlen)