cold call

Cold Calling Is Good, Actually

/ Ian Hurley / Leave a comment

“I know fear is an obstacle for some people, but it is an illusion to me. Failure always made me try harder next time.” – Michael Jordan

One of the (many) things that causes law students the most angst is the dreaded cold call. The fear is so pronounced that before I even attended a single 1L class, BC Law had shown me the famous cold calling scene from Legally Blonde multiple times. I understand why cold calling induces anxiety, especially in your early days of law school when you have likely never experienced it in other classroom settings. To be clear, this post should not be taken to suggest that cold calling does not make me nervous or that I never get a cold call embarrassingly wrong (I definitely do). But getting things wrong is kind of the point of learning and law school; otherwise, we’d be practicing attorneys already. 

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Past Experience Pays Off: How A Podcasting Career Prepared Me For 1L

/ Ian Hurley / Leave a comment

“It is not down on any map; true places never are.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

A little more than four years ago, I found myself in the producer’s chair, attempting to put together my first podcast for Wondery Media. The episode centered around a mystery story, one that remains unsolved. It was no unsolved murder or whodunit yarn, but instead a tale about what happened to a 7-foot 900 lbs bronze statue of Joe Paterno, the disgraced former-head football coach of the Penn State Nittany Lions. The statue disappeared in the aftermath of the Jerry Sandusky scandal that rocked the State College community back in 2011 and led to Paterno’s firing; a previously unbelievable outcome for a coach who at that time led the NCAA in career victories. The whereabouts of the statue remain unknown, and while that mystery remained, what became clear to me as I bumbled my way through putting that story together was just how little I knew about what an adequate producer does every day. 

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Conquering the Cold Call

/ Sangeeta Kishore / Leave a comment

I’ve only been in law school for a few weeks, and I’ve already been confronted with my biggest fear: the cold call. It’s unlikely that I’m alone in this. Like many of us, my initial visions of law school came from that scene in Legally Blonde where Elle was publicly shamed by the professor and kicked out of the classroom, with even the overachieving readers of Aristotle riddled with fear. 

The film’s exaggerations aside, I still felt daunted by the idea of entering a law school class. I won’t deny the panic I felt seeing the dreaded phrase on nearly every syllabus. “Why can’t I just answer when I feel like answering?” I could already picture it in my head: doing all the readings, knowing the cases front to back, and still freezing up the moment I get called on. It seemed like beyond all preparation, my mortification was inevitable. 

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Cold Called on Day One: Expectation Versus Reality

/ Tess Halpern / 5 Comments

During law school orientation, Associate Dean of Academic Affairs Daniel Lyons walked us through what we should expect from our first day. During this session, he showed us the infamous scene from Legally Blonde where Elle Woods experiences her first class. After we watched Woods get kicked out for not being prepared, he assured us that, while the movie gets some things right, it also gets some things wrong.

What did it get wrong, according to Dean Lyons? Our professors likely wouldn’t be as suave. Also, while they will call on you, they won’t pick on you with that degree of malice.

However, what it gets right is that there will be assignments before even the first day, and you will be expected to have done them. There also will be cold calling, probably not at first, but soon.

While this orientation session was surely meant to ease our anxieties mere days before we would begin a daunting academic adventure, it only made me more nervous. Experiencing anything like Woods’ first day seemed like a downright nightmare, and the only thing I didn’t have to worry about now was suave professors with outward malice? I started losing some sleep.

But after experiencing it firsthand — and living to tell the tale — I can assure you that the anticipation was far worse than the reality. 

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The Infamous Cold Call: Should You Be Terrified?

/ Alex Bou-Rhodes / 2 Comments

In law school, the primary method of teaching, at least in larger classes and especially during the first year, is referred to as the Socratic method. A professor will call on and question a student (usually at random) about the day’s assigned reading, typically a judge’s written decision or case. You’re asked what happened to cause the dispute, what position the opposing sides took and argued, and how the court reasoned through the issue. This happens in front of the eighty or so other students in class.  Public speaking consistently ranks among our greatest fears. The cold call in law school has you speaking in public without much preparation because you cannot know exactly what question will be put to you.

I didn’t know cold calling was a thing in law school until family and friends started asking me if I was nervous about it. I did some research and became terrified – and while it’s normal to feel that way, let me tell you why it might not be justified.

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