advice

What You Need for 1L, Day 1

/ Elizabeth Blass / Leave a comment

Starting off my 1L year, I was several years out of college. This was anxiety inducing for several reasons, but one, in particular, I didn’t expect: I had no idea what an adult human being in graduate school needed to bring to class. Do I bring notebooks? Every single one of my 50-pound books? Maybe get my hands on a trapper keeper? (Fun fact: I 100% owned that trapper keeper in the 4th grade.)

To help you avoid the onset of organizational stress, and facilitate your inevitable Staples run, I’ve compiled a list of some items you may want to think about bringing on the first day.

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Things I Wish I Knew, Vol. 11: Networking 101 – So what do I call them, exactly?

/ Charlene Ochogo / Leave a comment

Dear incoming 1Ls,

It’s been a while since my last segment of TIWIK, and that’s primarily because I wanted to find a topic that would be most useful to you in the next month or so while you’re getting ready for orientation and school to start. (15 days! Whoo!) So I got to thinking and I remembered that my first year almost exactly a year ago, the first month was filled with what I soon came to regard as a four-letter word: networking.

If you’re anything like me, networking will be a totally foreign concept to you, and you really will feel out of your league for a little while. What is supposed to come from this?, you’ll ask yourself. What is the purpose of this except to make me feel awkward and have to stand in heels for two straight hours?

Fear not, friends. Because for the next few weeks, I will be doing a series on the do’s and don’ts of networking that will make you feel at least marginally better about putting yourself out there.

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Things I Wish I Knew, Vol. 10: How to not be homeless before Sept. 1

/ Charlene Ochogo / Leave a comment

Greetings almost-1Ls!

So, by now you’ve probably done the math: orientation is August 20th, school starts on the 24th, and many of the leases for apartments you’ve been looking into start on September 1st.

Ruh-roh.

This is a sad reality about Boston (that most leases do start on September 1st), but the good news is that you will only be in this dilemma once in your law school career. I polled some of our rising 2Ls to see what they did for that week and boiled it down to a few options:

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Things I Wish I Knew, Vol. 9: Law school doesn’t teach you how to be a lawyer, and that’s kind of okay

/ Charlene Ochogo / 1 Comment

It defies our concepts of professional school, right?

Dentistry school: learn how to make people’s teeth healthy. Physical therapy school: help people regain lost movement. Electrician school, beauty school, you name it – all pretty much teach you everything you need to know to accomplish the job you’ll have after graduation.

Law school is the odd man out. Even attorneys I know who took classes in the area of law they now practice say that they learned most of how to do their job after they got it. That’s why I when someone asks me what type of law I want to practice, I always want to reply, “Well, I don’t think I know how to practice any type of law.”

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What We Do When We’re Not in Law School: A Survey of Summer Jobs

/ Elizabeth Blass / Leave a comment

One of the questions many prospective law students often have (and that I definitely had when I was looking at law school) is about what, exactly, law students do during their summers. The answer is: some pretty cool stuff. Below is a selection of summaries about what current BC Law rising 2Ls and 3Ls are currently doing in cities across the country, grouped into five categories: Firms, In-House Counsel & Consulting, Judicial Internships, Public Interest, and Government. This group isn’t necessarily representative (it basically represents who I could dragoon into writing something up for me on short notice — thanks friends!), but hopefully it will give you a general sense of the different types of work law students do before they graduate. As always, if you have any questions, use the comments to ask away!

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Remember “The Why”: A Letter from the Alumni Board President

/ Rob Rossi / 2 Comments

Editor’s Note: Kevin Curtin is the Boston College Law School Alumni Board President and a member of the BC Law Class of ’88. He is Senior Appellate Counsel/Grand Jury Director at the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office. He has tried approximately 100 jury cases and handled over 100 criminal appeals. Mr. Curtin is also an instructor in the Harvard Law School Trial Advocacy Workshop and a faculty member of the national trial Advocacy College at the University of Virginia School of Law. He is also an adjunct faculty member at BC Law. All of us at Impact are pleased to be able to host his guest blog post.

Commencement is a time for remembering why you chose to become a lawyer. That idea was reflected in the remarks of this year’s Commencement speaker, Assistant to the President and Director of the Office of Political Strategy and Outreach David Simas, BC Law ‘95. Dean Vincent Rougeau talked about it. It was also mentioned by Class President Lainey Sullivan ’15 (who recently committed to join the office of Middlesex District Attorney Marian T. Ryan ’79).

Coincidence? Maybe.

But what about this? Dean Rougeau, University President Father William P. Leahy, David Simas and Lainey Sullivan also spoke about something else: the idea of a tradition shared in common with those who have come before them. Something that makes Boston College Law School special—an essential bond that cannot be seen, but which is continuously affirmed as true.

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Things I Wish I Knew, Vol. 8: The best way to prepare for law school this summer

/ Charlene Ochogo / Leave a comment

…is to not prepare at all.

Dear Class of 2018, you have struggled through the undergraduate battleground, you finished a post-bachelor degree, or maybe you’ve summoned the courage to work AND apply to law school, and you’re positively ravenous for any advice on how to best prepare yourself for what lies ahead of you.

I have only three words for you: Treat. Yo. Self.

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For those of you unfamiliar with NBC’s Parks and Recreation, no worries – you have the entire summer with which to make yourself familiar. But for old fans of Donna Meagle and Tom Haverford, Treat Yo’ Self 2015 (aka, now until right around August 20th) should be spent on you.

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My Thank You Letter to BC Law: Looking Back On The Past Three Years

/ Luciabc / Leave a comment

It was about three years ago now that I was making my decision as to where to attend law school. It was a tough decision for me, as I am sure it is for most people. Even though I knew which school was the best fit for me, I was stressed out about turning down bigger scholarships elsewhere. Every time I went to send in my deposit, I started to second guess my decision.

It is a very personal decision to choose where you’ll spend the next few years of your life. Looking back now, I feel so grateful that I chose Boston College, and I feel lucky to have a mother like mine, who encouraged me to go with my gut in choosing BC. Last week I finished up my academic career here, and I am already starting to feel nostalgic for the community of friends and mentors I have found at Boston College Law School. Here, more than anywhere else, I have found a school where professors keep in touch with their former students, where administrators go out of their way to share opportunities with students, and where the group of classmates you find end up feeling like family after three years of going through life’s ups and downs together.

The first, and most important group, that deserves thanks is the BC Law student body. I made my first, and closest friends in Section 3, but as the years progressed I have gotten to know an amazingly diverse, passionate, friendly group of my classmates. These people have studied with me during exams, passed along their carefully formatted outlines, and accompanied me on all sorts of misadventures over the past three years. Especially when I compare my experience to those of my friends at other schools, I feel so fortunate to have found such a stellar group of people to spend the past three years with. On a broader scale, our student government, the Public Interest Law Foundation, and the myriad affinity groups here at BC have truly excelled at making Boston College a welcoming, fun, and engaging place to be a student.

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Things I Wish I Knew, Vol. 7: End senior year on a high note

/ Charlene Ochogo / Leave a comment

Dear College Seniors,

Congratulations! The finish line is in sight, you’ve picked up your cap and gown, you’ve probably scheduled or already taken your graduation photos, and all that’s left between you and summer is a bunch of finals. Now, If you’re anything like me, the second you got into BC, the greatest law school on Earth, you were pretty much done with undergrad. At least mentally.

I mean, think about it. As you stand right now, many of you have been going to school non-stop for the past 17 years (and probably even a couple summers here or there, too). You’re tired, and rightly so. You’ve done what you need to do, and likely, your GPA for graduation has already been calculated. What is it going to hurt if you just skate through finals and do the bare minimum?

Well, as it turns out, potentially a lot.

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Things I Wish I Knew, Vol. 6: The Car (or No Car) Chronicles (Part 2)

/ Charlene Ochogo / Leave a comment

Happy April, everyone! This is a continuation of last week’s post (check it out here!) on the question I get most frequently from students about what it’s like having (or not having) a car in Boston.

While I do have a car, I find that (whenever possible) it’s much more convenient to take public transportation. So much like last week, I’ll tell you what my experience has been in not using a car to get around.

PROS OF NOT HAVING A CAR

– You will never have to dig out your car or worry about parking. Enough said. 

Me and my ladies getting ready for Law Prom right before we took an Uber there.

Me and my ladies getting ready for Law Prom right before we took an Uber there.

– Going out is much easier. Law school is about having fun too, and not having a car or having to drive means you don’t have to worry about getting home safely from things like Law Prom.

– You’ll develop a knowledge of the MBTA that your friends will both fear and love. It’s amazing to me how many students with cars don’t know how to get around without them. You will be their guide and guru, showing them the wonders of a whole new world.

– No car means no gas money. Or car payments. Or insurance payments. Which means more money in your pocket to spend on things you actually enjoy.

– You learn to budget your time better. I have friends who live in Back Bay who get more done on their commute than I get done all day. Plus, because they don’t have a car, they’re always conscious of getting places on time. They know how to make their time count because they know that the ride home will either be a long one, or a generous offer from a friend.

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