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Berkeley Law 3L: A Real Person of Genius

The WSJ Law Blog just ran a post (I kid you not) entitled: On Crushing Your First-Year Exams: Advice From Some Who Did.

The post interviews second- and third-year students from law reviews at various schools about "how they managed to kill it on their first-year exams." Specifically, they asked law students to finish this sentence:

The smartest thing I did while preparing for my 1L first-semester exams was ______.

The responses ranged from bizarre (Vanderbilt Law: "the smartest thing I did while studying for exams 1L year was to go through each entire course [in my head] in successively shorter periods of time") . . . to stressful (Virginia: take practice exams but "don?t just go through them, take them ? pretend it?s the real thing, time limits and all. Then discuss answers") . . . to conventional (Brooklyn: "start outlining early in the semester") . . . . to reasonable, honest, and human:

Anonymous 3L at Berkeley, [an] editor on the California Law Review:

Perhaps the most important (and most difficult) advice is that you need to move on when the exam is over, either to prepping for your next exam, having a beer, or just generally getting on with your life. You might feel tempted to talk to your classmates about the exam, perhaps because you have nothing else to talk about (as your life of late was probably consumed with studying). Avoid this at all costs; at best you get affirmation in your answers (which could still be wrong), but at worst your start worrying that you missed something, which at this point is totally out of your control. . . . From my own experience and my friends, taking a law school exam can be defeating and leave students with the feeling that their days of studying were not properly translated to the answer they cranked out in three hours. Try your best not to dwell on those feelings.

Bingo.

Not only was that solid advice, but it was also given in a way that put Boalt's best foot forward in a national forum. It represents the calm, grounded people we try to be, and not the frenzied, neurotic, anxiety-machines the rest of the WSJ Law Blog's post invited 1L's to become. Well done.

Full post as published by Nuts & Boalts on December 11, 2009 (boomark / email).