Advice for Evening Division Law Students

Alternatively titled: So You Want to Go to Law School but Don't Want To (or Can't) Give Up Your Day Job.

As the new school year begins and a number of evening division law students begin their academic career, I thought I might offer a few tidbits of advice, having been there, done that, got the T-Shirt and somehow passed the bar without losing my sanity or my wife in the process.

Get a Calendar and Use It. Evening division students generally are working a full-time jobs while going to school. This means that your life for the next four years is going to be one very large exercise in time management, so start managing your time. I used my laptop's Outlook calendar and printed sheets from it for everything, from work appointments, to class times, exam dates, family events, birthdays, etc. I used the task list to track reading assignments, paper deadlines, and all the stuff I had to do at work and at home. On the plus side, this hyper-scheduling has worked well in my professional life now, since leaving law school--although now I have a work issued Treo for the time management.

Study Time--Schedule and Stick To It. The biggest danger in law school for evening division law students is letting their studies overwhelm their work or their work to overwhelm their studies. It is a delicate balance (since you probably need the job) to maintain and will take some trial and error. The other possibility is the feeling that you aren't studying enough and therefore you overdo the studying, staying up later and later to get school work done. The inevitable result is exhaustion, which causes poor performance both at work and at school.

Go To Class!! This seems like a no brainer, but I have seen a lot of evening division students miss a great deal of class because of their work. Talk to your boss, make arrangements to be in class as much as humanly possible. Get a network of classmates who can cover you with notes if need be, and be sure to reciprocate for them. Nothing beats being in class though. Look at it this way, you are dropping thousands of dollars a year to be in class, make sure your money is spent wisely.

Sleep the Same Hours--Everyday. One thing that I found that helped me is that I went to bed and got up at the same time, everyday, even the weekends. I got 6.5 hours of sleep every night, from 11:30pm to 6:00am, which was enough for me (the Navy does a good job of training bodies and minds for less sleep). My body, by the end of the first semester was used to this schedule and it worked well for me. I rarely, if ever, felt tired. That left me with 17.5 hours of waking time to get everything done, including commuting, work and school. If you need more sleep, go to bed earlier or get up later. The temptation to sleep more on the weekends is great, but you can't bank sleep like you bank money, so don't try. While you can operate on less sleep for a short period of time, over the long haul it is bad for you health and bad for your grades.

Do Not Go Anywhere Without a Law Book. You never know when you might get 20 minutes to read. Face it, even day students get behind in their reading, there is simply so much of it to be done. As an evening division student, you will not have as much time, no matter what you do and even 10 minutes of reading can get you enough pages read that it can make a difference.

Special Advice For Students In a Relationship--Especially if You Are Married. Make a time deal. You are not going to have enough time for everything and you will need to schedule time with your significant other/family. The deal between me and my wife was this. Saturday was her day. I could study in the morning before she woke up and in the evening after she went to bed. The time she was awake was her time, she scheduled it and while I had some input, I was forbidden from studying during that day without her permission. This gave us a set time, every week, that we spent together. In hindsight, it probably saved our marriage. Your significant other is as much a participant in this process as you are, and they need to have you around also. You sacrifice a great deal of time and money upon the altar of law school, there is no need to sacrifice your relationship as well.

There is a lot more advice to give and there are a number of places with advice for first year students and even second year students.