YOUR FIRST-YEAR SCHEDULE
When you arrive at Boalt Hall in August you will receive a schedule that contains the first-semester classes to which you have been assigned, including the names of the instructors and the days, times and locations of the classes. You will notice that you are assigned to a small section or module. This is a group of about 30 students with whom you will have all your classes in the first semester. Two of your classes will include only the members of your module; the other two classes will be composed of a mix of three modules.
Here’s the basic plan for your first-year schedule. In the first semester every first-year student will take three classes from the following five: Civil Procedure, Property, Torts, Contracts and Criminal Law. Each student will also take a skills course called Legal Research and Writing. In the spring semester, each student will have the courses from the above list that were not taken in the fall, and another skills course, Written and Oral Advocacy. You will also have two elective courses. In the first year you’ll probably have classes every weekday (including Friday, but not Friday afternoon).
THINGS ACADEMIC
Because much of the formal evaluation in law school happens only once a semester—on the final examination—many students spend the first semester wondering: Am I studying enough? Am I studying too much? Are my study habits productive? Am I really understanding the material? Would I be able to pass a test on the material? Instead of wondering about these things in the privacy of your own home, we advise you to reach out for information, help, guidance and human contact. You need to make sure you are learning properly as you go along, and you need to find ways throughout the semester to test not only your knowledge but also your approach to studying and learning.
How can you do this? Do the work for your classes and attend them all. Try to follow along in class and participate when you can. Volunteer to speak even when you are not required to. Try not to worry about saying something dumb in class; the idea is to control, or at least participate in, your own learning process. Outside class, introduce yourself to your professors, visit them during office hours, ask them questions. Some faculty members may set up electronic bulletin boards to answer questions online and encourage discussion; if they don’t, you might want to suggest this or take the initiative to help set something up. The point is, even if you are shy or feel intimidated, interacting with your professors will greatly enhance your law school experience.
Study Groups
Forging relationships with other students is also very important. Some students find it useful to engage in substantive discussion in the form of study groups, collections of students (the actual number varies) who get together on a regular basis to work on their classes. These groups differ in structure and function; they range from formal to very informal and focus on a range of tasks, from discussing class material to producing outlines and going over practice exams. Some study/discussion groups focus on one class; others tackle all the substantive subjects. You do not have to form or join a formal study group; many students do not. Some students discuss the material with one other person, some discuss the material with whomever will listen to them. The important thing is to find a way to actively engage with the substantive material you are learning.
Academic Support Program
One easy way to engage with the material is through participation in the Academic Support Program (ASP). There will be an ASP tutor, called a teaching fellow, assigned to your module group, who will conduct a one-hour meeting each week to go over material, answer questions and help you develop your skills. Participation in the ASP is optional, but most students find it really helps them in the first semester.
Grades
The Boalt Hall grading system imposes a strict curve in first-year classes—10% High Honors (HH) grades, 30% Honors (H) grades, and the remaining 60% of the students get Pass (P), Substandard Pass (PC) or No Credit (NC) grades. At Boalt Hall (as elsewhere), it is a sad fact that only 10% of the students can be in the top 10% of the class, so students who are used to being at the top, which all of you are, have to adjust to not always being at the top. The best advice we can give is that you should strive to learn the material and develop your skills as well as you possibly can, then take your exams and see what happens. Some students will excel in grades right off the bat. But many students start slowly and pick up steam—evidence that the skills are very learnable.
At some point during the first semester, most students have a concern about the low end of the spectrum, the Substandard Pass (also known as Sub-P, PC and other unmentionable nicknames), and No Credit grades. Try not to worry, because if you go to class, do your work and engage with the material through the ASP or some other route, it is unlikely you’ll receive one of these grades. If you
feel you are in danger, be sure to reach out to a professor or to the director of the Academic Support Program for extra help—you’d be wise to do this before you take your first set of exams. Because the faculty recognizes that some students might take some time to catch on, the Academic Rules provide that Substandard Pass grades received in the first semester appear on a student’s transcript as regular Pass grades. But note that after the first semester, Substandard Passes appear as such. Further details about the implications of Substandard Passes can be found in the Academic Rules.
Final Exams
Most of your first-semester classes (except Legal Research and Writing) will culminate in an exam during the finals period in December, although more and more instructors have been assigning papers in addition to or instead of exams. Law school exams are a unique experience and require skills you can learn but may not have practiced before. The trick is not just knowing the material, it is
knowing how to take an exam. Thus, it will be very important for you to learn what the exams look like, and practice writing them before you actually appear for your first real exam. But don’t worry about exams right now. At the proper time, which will be more than halfway through the semester, your ASP tutor and some of your instructors will let you know it is time to start thinking about exams and will help you begin to prepare for them.
BEYOND THE CLASSROOM
Adjusting to law school is exhilarating, but it can also be stressful. Our advice here is the same as for academic issues—join in on the law school life. Reach out for human contact, help and support. Whatever you do, don’t isolate yourself. When you have questions, concerns, doubts or problems, there are a number of places you can go to address them. You don’t have to be in dire straits; even if all you want is to see a friendly, familiar face, take note of the following people who can help:
The dean of students (Victoria Ortiz), the coordinator of student programs (Mindi Mysliwiec), and the student programs assistant (Polly Paterson) are available to take your calls or your visits. The Registrar’s Office (with Registrar Mary Kelleher-Jones and her staff, Margarita Jones, Nancy Kato, and Veronica Scrivner) and the Financial Aid Office (with Director Dennis Tominaga and Financial Aid Counselor Jimmy Ausemus) are also places you can go to get information as well as reassurance, guidance and answers to burning questions. Another resource is your legal writing instructor or your ASP/legal writing teaching fellow. The instructors are law graduates, and the teaching fellows are second- or third-year law students who are not too removed from your experience and who have demonstrated the intelligence, wisdom and maturity to win one of these highly coveted jobs. These students are familiar and comfortable with the trials and tribulations of the first year and are usually accessible and eager to get to know you and help out.
STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS AND JOURNALS
Many students find their place in law school by joining a student organization or journal (http://www.law.berkeley.edu/admissions/admittedllm/journals.html). Boalt Hall has a wide variety of organizations and some students join more than one. There will be an activities fair during the first week of classes, where you will have an opportunity to meet representatives from the groups and journals and find out more about them. In keeping with the law school’s spirit of cooperative education, student organization and journal membership is open to all students (with the exception of the California Law Review, which holds a writing competition), and first-year students are encouraged to participate.
Two pieces of advice: First, don’t feel that you have to join an organization; just be aware that the organizations exist and may provide a good opportunity to meet people and explore some of your substantive or social interests. Second, if you do join up, don’t overextend yourself. Especially during the first year, your studies should take up the bulk of your time.
WHAT'S HAPPENING AT BOALT?
On any given day of the week, there are a variety of school programs and student organization meetings at Boalt. Many of these meetings take place during the lunch hour, as there are typically no classes scheduled from 12:45 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. The best way to find out what’s going on each week is to visit the school’s website and view the News and Upcoming Events section. Some events will also be listed in the Boalt Bulletin Board (BBB). This weekly publication lists meetings and events; it also contains important notices from the Dean’s Office, the Career Development Office, Student Services, the Registrar’s Office, the Law Library and the Financial Aid Office. The BBB is distributed weekly and you can view it online at www.law.berkeley.edu/students/services/bbb. The law school administration assumes you are reading the BBB and often lists important notices and rules only in that publication. In other words, READ THE BBB—you are expected to know its contents. On the lighter side, the BBB features a weekly trivia quiz whose winner often takes home the coveted law library T-shirt.
REGISTERING FOR CLASSES
You’ll receive plenty of written information about what you need to do to be eligible to register and enroll (two different things) as a Berkeley student, and we will provide complete information about these processes during orientation.
Most students in other departments at the university have to go to Sproul Hall and wait in lines for the registrar’s services. At Boalt Hall we are fortunate to have our own Registrar’s Office so you have to spend only some of your time in the lines—and they are much shorter. Occasionally, you may have to venture down to Sproul Hall to remedy an error on your fee statement, but the friendly staff in Boalt’s Registrar’s Office will do what they can to save you the trip.
During your three years you’ll stop by the Registrar’s Office on many occasions. This is the place to ask questions about registration and TeleBEARS (our automated enrollment system), order transcripts, reserve rooms for meetings and, finally, make sure you are cleared for graduation. Mary Kelleher-Jones is our registrar; she knows everything there is to know about the enrollment and registration systems at Berkeley and she is interested in sharing this information with you. She and her staff have more than 50 years of experience among them, so you ought to have no problem getting your questions answered and concerns dealt with. If you have any suggestions for this office, drop a note in the suggestion box on the counter or take a moment to talk with the Registrar’s Office staff.
BUYING BOOKS
Boalt Hall’s bookstore is usually located on the first floor of Simon Hall, but we move it to a larger location (normally the Goldberg Room) during the week before classes and the first week of the semester to accommodate increased book-buying activity. In addition to casebooks and textbooks, the bookstore stocks food, supplies, commercial outlines, study aids, sweatshirts, aspirin and a good candy selection. Joyce Hall, the manager of the bookstore, has been the guardian angel of Boalt students for years.
The Boalt Hall bookstore is currently operated by Nebraska Books, owners of Ned’s bookstore on Bancroft Way (the street that borders the law school) below Telegraph Avenue. Nebraska Books remits a percentage of the sales from the Boalt Hall bookstore to the Boalt Hall Student Association (BHSA), which uses the money for its general budget and to fund student organizations at Boalt Hall.
Many second-year students sell their used first-year books to the incoming class; look for notes pinned up around the mailboxes and locker room area. If you buy used books, make sure to have the most current edition and make sure that the underlining and/or highlighting in the book is not too distracting for you.
The Registrar’s Office will give a list of required and recommended books to the bookstore; that list will also be included in your first-day registration packet. Assignments for the first day of classes, if there are any, will also be posted prior to orientation in the registrar’s glass case, and will be included in your packet. Do not buy your books until you know your assigned schedule. As for study aids and materials, you should probably wait until you know what you need before you start investing in these items. At least at the beginning of law school, the assigned casebook is probably all you will need to buy.
A word of warning: law books are very heavy. Most students invest in a good backpack; some use portable luggage to wheel their books around during the day. Each Boalt student is assigned a locker, and most make good use of them. (To be able to use your locker right away, bring a lock with you on the first day of orientation.) After you get organized, you will at any given time be able to leave the bulk of your books in your locker or at home. You might want to check with some of the local copy stores about their “strip and drill” technique, which removes the book’s binding and punches holes in the pages to allow you to carry around only the relevant parts of the books you are using in class.
GOING TO THE LIBRARY
Besides being one of the best law libraries in the country, the Boalt library, officially called G. W. McEnerney Law Library, is known for having the best staff of reference librarians anywhere. You’ll find that all the reference librarians are remarkably cheerful about answering your research questions and can be very helpful to you, so get to know them. For more specific information about the law library, you can read the publication entitled G. W. McEnerney Law Library at Boalt Hall: A Guide to Its Use and Services.
One very special thing about the library is Uncle Zeb’s Comment Book, located on the counter of the reference desk. The Comment Book is the place to ask your most pressing questions or make your most astute observations about life at Boalt Hall and life in general. Uncle Zeb will respond to all entries with a blend of insight, compassio and harsh reality.
Law students actually do study in the law library, although there are lots of other interesting libraries on campus to check out. After you get your tour of the law library during orientation, you can stake out the study areas that best suit your needs. There are a few reading rooms from which to choose and several areas with individual study carrels. The main reading room of Boalt’s law library holds the rare distinction of being one of the few library spaces in America where you can eat and drink without reprimand, provided you are courteous and indulge only in quiet and neat food (no corn nuts). However, eating and drinking are forbidden in the upper reading rooms and in all the areas where you see postings to that effect. Please take seriously these library rules, since we prefer not to have to deal with insect or rodent problems in the library.
GETTING A JOB
In early September you will see hundreds of otherwise normal-looking law students arriving at school dressed in business attire. This activity signals the beginning of the fall interview season for second- and third-year students as legal employers from coast to coast descend upon Boalt in search of new recruits. Interviews for second- and third-year students are held in the Durant Hotel, a few blocks away from Boalt. This is not a school-wide dress code, so don’t go out and buy a bunch of dress-for-success clothes just because the upper-class students are doing so. In fact, first-year students are prohibited by a National Association of Law Placement (NALP) rule from contacting employers before December 1, so there is nothing you can do about jobs until then. In line with this policy, our Career Development Office (CDO) is not available to first-year students until November 1. Take advantage of this NALP prohibition and don’t worry about the interview process or summer jobs while you are getting used to law school. Your turn to deal with these issues will come soon enough. At a series of meetings in early November, the CDO will offer lectures and workshops for first-year students on every aspect of the job search process, from résumé writing to effective interviewing techniques.
The most effective job search technique you can employ is to concentrate on your studies during the first semester. An understanding of legal analysis and an ability to produce effective legal writing and decent grades are key factors in your ability to secure employment. If you focus on these things, you will have a much better chance of getting a great job when you begin to search in earnest.
Boalt’s CDO offers a wealth of job-related materials and helpful, knowledgeable staff. The director is Joanne Karchmer.
THE BERKELEY CAMPUS
The UC Berkeley campus is a beautiful oasis in an urban setting, with a host of free resources, programs and events open to enrolled students. If you are new to campus, stop by the ASUC Bookstore and pick up a copy of the Resource, in which you will find a good introduction to the university and an overview of the campus. There is also an extensive listing and description of numerous campus services and offices, along with many useful hints on how to make the most of your student enrollment. For information and questions regarding current events and programs happening on campus, call the CALendar (510-642-2294). For a guided tour of the campus call 510-642-5215. You can also check out the Visitor Services website, www.urel.berkeley.edu/public_affairs/visitors.html.
