Returning to BC Law after 2L Summer – no matter your internship – takes an adjustment. Over the summer we have been trusted with real legal responsibilities, worked on case teams, represented clients in court, drafted transactional and litigation documents, and previewed the careers waiting for us upon graduation.
There are two emerging approaches to tackling our 3L year. The first is escaping school work and maximizing experiential opportunities, the second is soaking up every moment of student life. I fall in the first category, my friend Taylor MacDonald falls in the latter, and we will do our best to encapsulate these two approaches.
The Escape Hatch 3L
During my 1L summer, I accepted a 2L Summer Associate offer in Washington, D.C. As a result, I knew that I would struggle to return to the academic grind. I decided to take advantage of the 3L scheduling flexibility and planned my schedule to avoid classes on Monday and Friday, and to maximize my experiential credits.
This semester I am in the Child Health and Education Clinic which is part of the Civil Litigation Clinic umbrella. I am also taking Advanced Litigation Skills: Fact Development where the assessment is a semester-long case file. To enable this 3L flexibility, I’ve already taken most of the bar classes like Criminal Procedure, Evidence, and Corporations, and am at peace with the fact that I will need to learn Trust and Estates, Family Law, and Secured Transactions for the Bar – especially because I am taking the Applied Legal Concepts class, a pass/fail Bar prep course that BC Law offers to 3Ls. I’ll also be participating in BC Law’s BC in DC program where I will extern in Washington, D.C. during my final spring semester of law school.
I’m very excited about the clinic because it connects with my prior work as a teacher. This will be a great opportunity to give back to the Greater Boston community and help me refine my lawyering skills with a focus on feedback I received at my internship over the summer.
An unforeseen challenge to my schedule is that having formal classes only three days a week has made it harder to find structure during the week and maintain productivity. I still have plenty of work to do, but also more times when I’d love to pretend I don’t.
To celebrate 3L I’m trying to be more spontaneous about plans and am even attending a concert in New Hampshire on a Wednesday night. I made it to a New England Revolution game at Gillette Stadium, and have planned a trip to Maine during peak leaf-peeping season with my 1L law school friends. My flexible class schedule has made it very easy for me to say yes to these different events and I have loved the feeling of freedom so far!
The 3L Tackling Academics
Taylor MacDonald worked at a law firm in Boston this summer in their IP group. During her 2L year, she participated in the Compassionate Parole Clinic, which recentered her after a 1L year that’s almost purely black-letter law. Based on her current enthusiasm for classes, this seems to have given her the extra boost of energy to continue learning substantive law after a successful summer working in a law firm.
She took an entirely different approach to scheduling and leveraged the variety of asynchronous credit options that BC Law offers. When planning her schedule, Taylor kept Fridays free and maximized her productive time. She is not a morning person and made sure that she scheduled a class mid-morning every day besides Friday, to make sure that she used that time productively. She left her afternoons free so that she could relax during the day and finish any work as needed at night, her other most productive window. She is taking the required Professional Responsibility class this semester, Patent Law, Applied Legal Concepts, and her “fun” class– Supreme Court Experience with Professor Greenfield.
Taylor originally scheduled her classes around an elective that unfortunately was canceled due to low enrollment. This is not common, but can sometimes happen because of the wide array of classes BC Law offers. As a result, she’ll take two substantive Bar classes in her final semester: Criminal Procedure and Corporations. Both professors teaching those courses next semester are fan favorites, Dave Rangaviz and Natalya Shnitser.
A significant contrast between Taylor and the Escape Hatch Student is that she’s keeping her personal life approach relatively unchanged during 3L. She has been steady about living in the moment and continues to do so throughout law school. Instead of putting her head down to relax later, she’s struck a balance between her coursework and her personal life to usually be in a position to say yes to plans between both 2L and 3L years.
There is no single “right” approach and there are infinite iterations of both our strategies. We’ve both loved our law school experiences despite all of the challenges and uncertainty it brings, and we are looking forward to making our 3L year the best one yet.
Reilly Doak is a third-year student at BC Law. Contact her at doaka@bc.edu.
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