NCCU Law 1L/1LE Orientation starts this week!

I can’t believe it’s that time of year again already

Yesterday was the 3-year anniversary of law:/dev/null starting up, meaning this week is officially Orientation Week for all the new 1Ls and 1LEs1 at the North Carolina Central University School of Law!

This will also be the first time since then that I’m not taking part in Orientation in some capacity — as a 1L I was part of it of course, then as a 2L I was a tour guide and part of the SBA panel, then as a 3L folks decided they were sick of me talking so they had me moderate the SBA panel instead

But the school tends to leave us alone during this limbo period waiting on bar results, I’m assuming because few of us would be willing to be around the school when we have no clue yet how we’re going to repay our student loans.

So in my absence, I’ll follow my tradition from year’s past and link to some (hopefully) useful entries for those of y’all heading in to Orientation

 

ORIENTATION ITSELF:

For our past entries on Orientation, you’ve got two options:

1. My 2L post on what to expect at Orientation; or
2. My three-part summary I wrote as a 1L of what I went through (Part I, Part II, Part III)

 

OUTLINES:

You’ll hear lots of folks talking about outlines and stuff they got from other people. Some of it will be new and potentially useful — so make friends — but a good chunk of it is recycled and passed down from generation to generation.

For 1L, 2L, and 3L outlines,2 go to this TDot’s Tips outlines entry so you can read the directions and mandatory disclaimer.

Also, for the 3Ls who happen across this entry, I’ve uploaded bar prep materials to “/docs/BarPrepStuff.zip” as promised yesterday

 

TIPS and QUESTIONS:

Over the years I’ve compiled tips on a handful of topics. To read through those entries, click the TDot’s Tips category link on the side.

I’ve also answered a couple dozen questions folks have sent since I started law:/dev/null. To see those, go to the very bottom of the most recent Mailbag entry and they’re all listed there (including an entry just on 1L questions ).

 

ANY OTHER QUESTIONS? EMAIL / FACEBOOK / LINKEDIN / TWEET ME!

If you can’t get something answered during the year, feel free to shoot me an email (the address is at the bottom of our About page). You can also reach out to me on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter using the icons over on the right-hand side of this page.

Hope that helps, GOOD LUCK with law school, and welcome to the Legal Eagle family!

1. Evening students — NCCU Law is one of the few law schools in the country with a 4-year part-time evening program [↩]
2. Yes, I have documents to get you through your entire law school experience. You’ll still have to study and update this stuff as you go though! [↩]

Tags: 1L, NCCU Law, Orientation, Post-L

TDot’s Mailbag v8.0: Post-Bar Exam Edition

Good evening y’all

We’re just shy of the 3-week mark since I took the North Carolina bar exam, and one of the things on my disturbingly long to-do list1 has been re-engaging with all the social media outlets I let wither over the past couple months. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and of course law:/dev/null updates have finally been getting some long-overdue attention.

As I started easing back into the blogging routine, I also realized I haven’t done a TDot’s Mailbag entry in over a year

So I figured it’s a good time to knock out some of the questions I’ve gotten asked since the bar exam a couple weeks back…

***

Q: Olivia2 asks:

When preparing for the bar did you actually use materials from school? I think I’ve managed to keep every paper from every class thinking that I will need to look at it again one day. Now I’m running out of room and I’m trying to throw things out but I’m afraid lol. What were the things you needed? Any advice would be great!

A: Don’t hate me for saying this, but… I didn’t consult a single paper from law school in prepping for the bar exam

In terms of what you’ll need, whatever bar prep company you choose will send you oodles of stuff to get you through the exam. You’ll likely get around a dozen textbooks, access to an online database with thousands (!) of sample multiple choice questions, and a string of video lectures re-teaching you the core snippets of law in all the subjects that can be tested.

Many law schools also have supplemental programs of their own, such as NCCU Law‘s Invest in Success program that focuses on the essay portion of the exam.

And honestly, you’ll probably also be surprised / a little weirded out at how much law you’ve remembered over the years. Even though I won’t know if I actually passed the bar exam for another couple weeks, I never had writer’s block while taking it like I worried I would — I read the prompt, realized the area of law getting tested, and could spit out at least something vaguely resembling a coherent rule without much second-guessing.

Now even though your papers might not be any use to you, I’m one of the (apparently few) folks who have kept all my textbooks and found myself referring to several of them during different internships: specifically my Contracts book (bluelining), my CrimLaw and Evidence books (larceny and hearsay respectively), my Employment Discrimination book (Title VII), and my ConLaw book (time/place/manner restrictions on speech).

You could probably find all of the same info in a Google search, but having read through the material in class once already I have a mental image in my mind of where what I’m looking for can be found. Your mileage may vary on that one, but I hope it helps

***

Q: Savannah asks (after I blew up her Twitter timeline participating in the recent #1LTools tweet-up hosted by the Law School Toolbox):

So is twitter the new gig? I’ve been scouring your blog for info about your 2L classes and profs!

A: Yyyeeeaaahhh that’s not Twitter’s fault, I just did a bad job with blog updates most of 2L/3L year

There are a few entries on here under our 2L tag, and for the list of classes I took you can check out this entry on Fall 2010 and this one on Spring 2011.3 Beyond that feel free to send me an email or message over Twitter/Facebook with questions until I get more material posted!

***

Q: Tim asks:

Now that you’re no longer a law student (and hopefully an attorney soon), what’s your plan for the blog? Are you going to keep it? Change the title? Change the focus?

A: We’ll see / Yes / No / Maybe.

I’m definitely planning to keep law:/dev/null live and updated, if for no other reason than it gives me an opportunity to help spread the word about my law school. I know at least a dozen people who applied to NCCU Law because of what they’ve read here — the “Why NCCU Law?” page is still one of the most-visited on the blog — and even though a dozen is a drop in the bucket of what they get each year, every little bit of publicity helps.

Plus it’s kinda cool being on the first page of Google results when people search for the school

The name will also probably stay as it is; even though I’ll hopefully be licensed by the end of the month, we don’t stop being students of the law just because we’ve graduated from law school right?4

As for the plan and focus of the blog, we’ll see what happens. I’ve still got a lengthy backlog of law school-related topics to go through — not just the May and June entries that are half-written, but posts I never got around to writing in the first place (like my 2L/3L grades) — and will probably continue offering my $.02 on law school-related developments in the news. Then there’s the whole wide world of law-outside-of-law-school to comment on, with the occasional update on my dog Samson5 and NC SPICE and various other projects thrown in.

The key, of course, will be whether I find the time to actually keep things up to date  But stay tuned!

***

Q: Patrick asks:

Where do things stand with SPICE?

A: NC SPICE is still in its start-up phase, so we’re doing a bunch of things simultaneously as we work to get off the ground.

Our first Board of Directors meeting was the Friday before the bar exam where we adopted our bylaws, mission, product matrix, and related items. I’ve fired off grant requests to a couple foundations with more in progress. The NC SPICE Facebook page got fleshed out a bit, I’ve started working on the NC SPICE Twitter account,6 I added a LinkedIn company page, and at some point this coming week I’ll get to work on the main website itself.

One question mark looming over the group is what relationship (if any) we’ll have with NCCU Law. Our new Dean talked about building a traditional incubator “in house” during her search committee interview — which was my original idea for NC SPICE before the Chief told me there was no money to make it happen — so if the administration sees us as competitors it’ll be difficult to build a collaborative partnership. I’m still holding out hope for a consortium-style approach modeled after the Center for Child and Family Health, where you have an independent entity that multiple schools help support. We’ll see what happens on that end in the months ahead.

But until then, I’m still going full steam ahead!  Once we’ve got funding we’ll get our first SPICE Center open, and once the website is operational we’ll get the SPICE Rack in place.7

If you or someone you know might be interested in the services that NC SPICE offers, feel free to send an email to info [at] ncspice.org!

***

Q: Vanessa asks:

So how does it feel being DONE??

A: Weird.

The first few days after the exam, I still kept waking up at the crack of dawn and falling asleep early like I had in the week leading up to the test. Then during the day I spent a lot of time reading the news, Facebook-stalking people, cleaning and re-cleaning the apartment, working out, basically anything that didn’t involve thinking in any capacity. There were a couple times where I almost felt inclined to do some practice multiples just so I’d have something intellectually stimulating. Most of my classmates had left town to relax, my 2L-turned-3L friends typically had summer internships or summer school, and folks from undergrad were like “Oh, you’re finally done? Welcome to the real world I entered 3 years ago” 

The only real structure to my days are breakfast, lunch, dinner, and taking the dog out at various times in between. The rest of the time gets spent working on NC SPICE, surfing the web, and trying not to think about the bar exam. It’s a very useless feeling that I’ll look forward to ending one way or the other in a couple weeks.

***

Q: Alex asks:

T. Greg, you didn’t seem stressed at all during bar prep, and you certainly don’t seem stressed now. What’s your secret?

A: Faking it well  (Kidding!)

A year and a half ago Kaplan asked me to write a piece for their Beyond Hearsay blog, and my first entry was on my experience as a college dropout and subsequently learning that fearing failure stalls success. It’s a personal mantra I force myself to remember whenever I get stressed out.

Now I still had occasional moments where I felt sick from nervousness, especially after some of my initial essay grades during NCCU Law‘s Invest in Success program. And I still made sure to put in the work needed to pass, including sitting through every single mind-numbingly slow lecture and running through well over 1,000+ practice questions.

But if you know you’ve put in the time and effort, what more can you do? Worrying about it just throws you off your game right at the very moment when you need to be focused the most.

That was all pre-exam. Post-exam, there’s really no point in stressing out because you can’t go back and change the test results! Pass or fail, my outcome was predetermined the minute I turned in my papers and there’s nothing else I can do about it. So I’ve turned my attention to doing something useful with my life — which is a great stress reliever in itself

***

Q: Natalie asks:

You knew I was going to ask this lol: do you have any bar exam study materials?

A: Yes ma’am — I’ll upload them at some point in the next few weeks and we’ll post them alongside the 1L and 2L/3L Outline files 

***

That’s it for this entry y’all Thanks again to all of you for your continued support of law:/dev/null, and if you have any questions don’t hesitate to send an email to tdot [at] lawdevnull.com!

—===—

From the Mailbag archives:

• TDot’s Mailbag v8.0: Post-Bar Exam Edition [this post] –
  • What materials did you use for bar prep?
  • Are you bailing on law:/dev/null for Twitter?
  • What are your plans for law:/dev/null post-graduation?
  • Where do things stand with NC SPICE?
  • How does it feel being done with everything?
  • What’s your secret to not being stressed about the bar exam?
  • Do you have any bar exam study materials?
• TDot’s Mailbag v7.0: Legal Eagle Grading Edition –
  • You made Dean’s List… but grades don’t matter?
  • Why is NCCU Law’s curve so low?
  • What is the rationale for NCCU Law’s dismissal policy?
  • How does the dismissal policy work?
  • What are NCCU Law’s GPA cutoffs for Dean’s List and academic honors?
  • Do you get notified if you made Dean’s List?
• TDot’s Mailbag v6.0: 1L Questions Edition –
  • Do we really need to study 60 hours a week?
  • My study partners study all day; am I missing something?
  • How time-consuming is being an SBA Representative?
  • Should I use “canned” briefs or create my own?
  • Is law school really just a big head game?
  • What’s the biggest difference between 1L year and 2L year?
  • What made you pursue law after having done computer science?
• TDot’s Mailbag v5.0: What Law School’s Really Like –
  • Admissions?
  • Bar Exam?
  • The Work?
  • Professors?
  • Electives?
  • Extracurriculars?
  • What would you do differently?
• TDot’s Mailbag v4.0 –
  • What really made you dislike BigLaw?
  • Why were 2 of the top 4 teams in the K-S competition from T4s?
  • What happened to Tweet-sized Tuesdays and the Friday Drive-by?
  • How did your CivPro I final exam turn out?
• TDot’s Mailbag v3.0 –
  • What’s your email address?
  • Do you really send/receive thousands of text messages in a month?
  • How are you adjusting to a historically black university?
  • Are you really a Republican?
• TDot’s Mailbag v2.0 –
  • Did you have a bunch of study materials for the LSAT?
  • How well did you do on the LSAT?
  • How did you do in your election for 1L SBA Rep?
  • Who is in the Gang of Eight?
• TDot’s Mailbag v1.0 –
  • What does law:/dev/null mean?
  • Did your entry about That Guy really happen?
  • Did you really count the lights from your apartment to school?

1. Trying to figure out how to make a living is a lot more involved than studying for law school! [↩]
2. As a FYI for any new folks who’ve found us over the past year, I keep the names on these submissions anonymous (picked at random from the Social Security Administration’s Popular Names database) so feel free to send me an email if you’ve got a question but don’t want to risk having your name in print [↩]
3. The only changes from that class list: I dropped App Ad and re-enrolled 3L Fall, and I ended up with Judge TP as my Trial Practice professor. [↩]
4. Yes, I realize that’s probably a cheesy explanation. For an alternative reason, I’m just stubborn and don’t want to change the title [↩]
5. I got him a year ago as of this week! [↩]
6. Though I fumbled by committing a classic error: following a couple hundred people all at once. To most folks NC SPICE now looks like a spam account, with a disproportionate following:follower ratio and a low tweet count [↩]
7. SPICE Centers are what we’re calling our physical offices in each county, and the SPICE Rack will be an online clearinghouse for attorneys with unused office space for lease/sale — giving new graduates instant access to counties across North Carolina until we’re able to expand out to those areas! [↩]

Tags: 2L, AppAd, Bar Exam, Bar Prep, Exams, Fan Mail, Judge TP, NC SPICE, NCCU Law, Post-L, Samson, The Chief, Tweet Tweet