Law school can zap away your time in a way unlike most other things. Below, I’ve included 5 of my favorite simple recipes that I can throw together with just a little bit of preparation and that make for a great dinner or a delicious leftover lunch — and [in my unexpert opinion] are nutritionally sound enough to fuel you for the long class days and intense readings.
Read on…
Continue readingAfter a long, relaxing, and unproductive break, we’re back at school. While it can be nerve-wracking to start a new semester, with new classes, professors, and expectations to manage, it can also be a chance for a fresh start. We like to set resolutions for ourselves each new year to (hopefully) guide how we’ll live moving forward, but as law students, the same practice can be useful before returning to the classroom. Here are three of my resolutions for this semester that I think could be beneficial for us all.
Outline (Semi) Regularly
I’ve heard the advice that law students should add to their outlines every week, and I even know students who follow this practice. While that sounds borderline impossible for me, I also recognize that my strategy of waiting to outline until classes end is also…not ideal.
Continue readingThis holiday season, I’m incredibly thankful to everyone who participated by submitting their pets. Stay tuned for Ch. 4, released during the Spring semester, to meet even more of our furry, scaly, and feathered friends!
Joey is a 3L from Rolling Hills, CA and Asmodeus is his 14-month-old Flemish Giant Rabbit who is a “menace to society.” He loves to rampage through Joey’s apartment, tear holes in his clothes and bank account, and destroy Joey’s sense of sanctuary. Despite this, or maybe because of it, Joey shared that Asmodeus “Is perfect and I love him.”
Continue readingA career services advisor can be an amazing resource in law school as you navigate OCI, externships, clerkship applications, and more. However, it’s important that you find the advisor who can best help you reach your personal goals! To do so, follow along with this new series to learn about each CSO advisor at Boston College Law School. Here is our interview with Michelle Grossfield.
What was your path to the CSO, and why did you choose to go into career advising?
After law school, I practiced child welfare law at the public defender’s office in Massachusetts. It was an incredibly rewarding and challenging experience to represent children, families, and legal guardians in the Juvenile and Probate and Family courts in Plymouth and Worcester counties. The stakes in care and protection matters are incredibly high for families, given the fact that parental rights can be terminated, and parents may have no ability for future contact during a child’s upbringing. I was fortunate to have excellent mentors, colleagues, and training early on in my career, and was honored to advocate for the children, mothers, fathers, and parental figures appointed to me as they navigated incredible societal barriers and multiple complex systems.
Continue readingA career services advisor can be an amazing resource in law school as you navigate OCI, externships, clerkship applications, and more. However, it’s important that you find the advisor who can best help you reach your personal goals! To do so, follow along with this new series to learn about each CSO advisor at Boston College Law School. Here is our interview with Chris Teague.
What was the biggest challenge you faced in law school, and how did you overcome it?
My biggest challenge in law school came during the spring semester of my 1L year. I started the semester very excited to take a class that was closely related to the type of law I wanted to practice, but much to my surprise, I ended up hating the class. This really threw me for a loop because I was one of those students who came to law school knowing EXACTLY what they wanted to do with their degree. When I realized I didn’t enjoy the class, I started to feel kind of lost. I had been so hyper-focused on one practice area that it was hard for me to start thinking about what my other options might be.
Continue readingThanksgiving comes at a difficult time of year for law students. While we want to enjoy the holiday, the hours of travel and time away from our computers can make it stressful as finals inch ever closer. But this year, I wanted to make sure we as a community took at least a little time to focus on what the holiday is all about. There’s plenty to be thankful for here at Boston College Law School, so take a moment to remember what you love about this school. Here’s what some students had to say when they were asked what they’re thankful for at BC Law.
Conner Packebush, 1L: The community, which is incredibly kind. It’s also so easy to talk and connect with professors.
Maria Russo, 2L: Friends who make the stressful finals season more bearable.
Adel Clemonds, 3L: Affinity groups and free food.
Meghan Doyle, 1L: The welcoming community.
Jared Coltey, 2L: First Generation Professionals — this group has given me a sense of community and belonging during stressful times in law school.
Katie Cross, 3L: The amazing friends Boston College has given me that make coming to school everyday something to look forward to.
Christian Bilgrien, 1L: The professors showing care for our mental health.
Laura Stateler, 2L: Community, community, community.
Paul Sevigny, 3L: Community, support, and being treated like a human first and foremost.
Katarina Bettencourt, 1L: The kindness and support of students and faculty.
Nicole Kerrigan, 2L: My section’s softball team.
Aaron Morris, 3L: The understanding and appreciation of life outside of law school from professors, faculty, and other students that allow law school — and the stresses it brings — to not overtake my entire life.
Andres Leiva, 1L: The opportunity to meet lawyers from big law firm practices and make professional connections.
Cordelia Houck, 2L: The sense of community both inside and outside the classroom, which makes the stress of law school more manageable. When things get stressful, the people around me keep me grounded and remind me that there’s more to life than law school.
Gabriel (Gabe) McCarthy, 3L: The friends I have met from all walks of life, and the chance to learn from such amazing professors.
Tess Halpern is a third-year student and president of the Impact blog. Contact her at halperte@bc.edu.
It’s not like a solar eclipse or Hadley’s comet, it’s the annual convergence between flu season and first-semester exams. Lucky enough for us, nature dropped a new addition on the menu of discontent four years ago, in the form of Covid-19. Unless humanity manages to eradicate the most common seasonal viruses or the earth’s hemispheres flip, it is a problem we must contend with as long as the school year begins in Autumn.
Inevitably, there is a cost-benefit analysis within every fevered mind: the need to balance the benefits of attending a class where material is likely to be more complex as the semester wraps up and the cost of potentially infecting your classmates, neglecting rest and recovery, and having to face a long day in a fatigued state. Moreover, professors still need cold call victims and a dwindling pool of targets only increases the burden of each unwilling participant. Finally, professors are more likely to drop hints at what will be covered in the exam the following month.
Continue readingA career services advisor can be an amazing resource in law school as you navigate OCI, externships, clerkship applications, and more. However, it’s important that you find the advisor who can best help you reach your personal goals! To do so, follow along with this new series to learn about each CSO advisor at Boston College Law School. Here is our interview with Amy Kolb.
What’s the best piece of career advice you can offer students?
I think it’s important for students to stay flexible and open-minded during their job searches and throughout their careers. By approaching a job search with an adaptable mindset, students may discover unexpected interests and opportunities they would’ve otherwise overlooked.
Continue readingAs finals season approaches, many of us are buried in our textbooks, reviewing case briefs, finalizing outlines and memos, and visiting professors during office hours. In doing so, a few may have encountered the doctrine of “implied warranty of fitness.” For some, this doctrine might sound familiar from contract law.1 For others, it might sound familiar from property law.2 But the “implied warranty of fitness” I’m referring to exists beyond model codes, cases, and classrooms: the implied need to be physically and mentally fit.
For newly minted 1Ls, law school has shown us that we constantly engage in rigorous and complex thought processes, from comprehending unnecessarily convoluted cases and writing legal memos to pondering hypotheticals and participating in competitions. These “mental gymnastics” require countless hours studying in the library and at home on top of regularly scheduled class time—all of which is spent sitting down. Evidently, life in the legal world is largely sedentary, which makes sense considering that physical fitness is neither an ABA requirement nor testable material on the UBE.
Continue readingA career services advisor can be an amazing resource in law school as you navigate OCI, externships, clerkship applications, and more. However, it’s important that you find the advisor who can best help you reach your personal goals! To do so, follow along with this new series to learn about each CSO advisor at Boston College Law School. Here is our interview with Dorothy Commons.
What’s the best piece of career advice you can offer students?
Believe in yourself and embrace a growth mindset. As an advisor, I often browse through LinkedIn to identify alums who are in certain practice areas or settings, and while doing so, I come across many who I worked with when they were law students. This has become a fun practice, because our alums are doing some really cool things with their careers — which should be no surprise because, like you, they are smart people who went to a great law school! I often notice that many are in very different positions from the first ones they had, and some have pivoted a few times. I know some started with what they thought was their dream job, and others began in positions they knew they would move on from. The common thread here is that they worked hard, remained curious, believed in themselves, and moved forward.
All the stresses of law school can, at times, make some students doubt themselves, and the stress of any job search is real. But please remember that you are here for a reason. Believing in yourself, putting yourself out there again and again, and reflecting on your experiences will help you learn, grow, and find opportunities.
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BC Law: Impact 