The day law school almost killed me...

I still remember the circumstances surrounding the start of my law school experience like it was yesterday.  I finished the last day of classes for my undergraduate degree on Tuesday, then immediately packed up my wife and two kids, drove more than 2,000 miles, moved into our new apartment, and started law school on the following Monday.  Despite being physically and mentally exhausted from the move, I was excited for the beginning of a new era in my life.  I was early to class on the first day, sitting there all nervous and jittery, and I couldn’t wait to meet my classmates, my professor, and get down to the business of studying law.

As it turns out, everyone had already gotten down to business. 

“Please open your books to Johnson v. M’Intosh, which I trust all of you have read and briefed.” The professor said, curtly, and called on one of my classmates to give a summary of the facts.  To my surprise, that classmate started restating the facts of the case, which, until a few seconds before, I’d never even seen.  And then we got to the next case, and the next case, and the next case, until we’d gone through 6 or 7 cases, learned some surprisingly complex legal theories, and thoroughly bludgeoned my brain.

I stopped one of my classmates at the end of the hour and asked how everyone knew which cases to read, and that person (who later became one of my closest friends in law school) told me about the reading assignments we’d received by email.  I knew that my face paled at that moment because I could literally feel the blood draining from my body as I realized that in all the fuss from moving across the country, I’d failed to check my email.  I was frozen in place as everyone filed out of the classroom and into the next.

I had three classes that day, and none of them went very well.  I stayed in the law library until very late that night to read all the cases I should have read, and then the cases that were assigned for the next day.  After getting a few hours of sleep, I was back again in the same seat I’d been in the day before.  I was prepared to answer questions, but I was already feeling the first tinges of burn-out.  Over the following weeks, the feeling that I was drowning became more and more a part of my life.  And it wasn’t just me.  Most of my classmates were struggling not only with the work load, but with the task of absorbing many difficult concepts each day, and transferring that information into a manageable system of study to prepare for the quickly approaching exams.

I couldn’t figure out why I was struggling so much.  I had read several law school prep books, and I had spoken to many lawyers and law students about how to manage the work load, but I was missing something.  Whatever I was doing wasn’t working, but there had to be a trick, or something, because I knew that law students eventually figured it out to the point where they were bored during the third year.  I didn’t want to wait for the third year to know what was going on, so I sat down and made a list of everything that I was doing each day.

The list grew and grew, until I realized that I was doing too much.  I needed to be more efficient with everything I did each day.  I didn’t have a choice, because I was going crazy.

In order to become more efficient and effective, I made a list of what needed to happen or not happen each day.  I stuck to that list until they became habits, and before long, it was working.  I was getting what I needed to get out of law school, and I was enjoying life.  Developing a set of habits worked for me, so I thought: why not share it with others?  The result was my first book to be traditionally published: Law School Fast Track.

I put everything that worked into this book, and left out all the fluff that didn’t work.  The finished product was a short, easily digestible book that contained only the stuff that would help a student become a better, more efficient student and ultimately find success.  I purposely left it very short in order to maintain the quality of the advice.

I applied the same principles in my follow-up book, College Fast Track.  I felt then, and still feel very strongly now, that the college (and law school) experience is something to enjoy.  It is also a springboard for your future, so it is important that the experience is not squandered.  You’ve got to have fun, you’ve got to enjoy college and law school for what they are, but you’ve also got to set a successful future in motion.  You can do that with the advice found in these books.

Now, I didn’t write these books because it was super fun for me.  Contrary to popular belief, writing about study techniques is not the roller coaster it seems to be.  No, I wrote these books because the advice and suggestions in these books worked.  I found success as a student with the stuff found here, and I know that you can to.  If you don’t want to take my word for it, follow these links to hear what others have said:  LSFT, CFT.

So if you are smack in the middle of college or law school, or are about to start, give these books a try.  If you know someone in college or law school, these books will make great gifts.  You can find them wherever books are sold and on your Amazon Kindle.  Follow this link for more options.

Thanks for stopping by.  I’d love to hear from you, either in the comments below, or you can find me on Facebook or Twitter.  You can also find more information about law school and college on twitter with: @EDUfasttrack

Good Habits=College Salvation

Habits help us. Or they can hurt us.

Good habits help in everyday life, in the many day-to-day things we have to do. Being a student is really no different. When you develop good habits that help you accomplish your goals and tasks quickly and well, you will be more successful. It’s important, however, to get beyond the thinking that good habits are “hard” and bad habits are “easy”; sometimes that’s true, but often it is not. Many times, a good habit is simply doing things logically, proactively, and with care.

Well, okay…not “simply.”

It’s easy to say we’ll build good habits; the challenge is to actually do that.  A habit is something you do without needing to think. In college you will need to think—a lot—but you will also need to focus your energies on immediate tasks and goals, as well as on your future. Many times we’re not exactly sure what specific tasks we should focus on, or even what our goals (or future) should be, so it’s not surprising that our habits are not always good ones. Developing these good habits will help you as a student, allowing you to focus better on actual learning. Grades are a reflection of that. Success will come. 

Although the advice in this book will ultimately make your work as a student less difficult, the road is far from easy. You will still have to put in real hours, and you will have to work hard. The point is that by establishing these good habits you won’t have to work as hard. And when you do work, it won’t seem so much like “work.” And when you’re done, you can actually enjoy yourself!  More than that, you can enjoy yourself without guilt or that nagging sense when blowing off this class or that project that you’re getting further and further into trouble.

The focus of College Fast Track (and Law School Fast Track, in a law school context) is to develop one general habit that will not only help you be a stellar college student, but also help you throughout your working and personal life. This habit will put you a cut above most students and even most people you will ever encounter—and it seems like such a logical habit to develop. You’d think everyone would be focused on it, but for some reason we, maybe even as a species, just love to waste time. Students spend a lot of time doing things they think are important and still more time doing things—be honest—they know aren’t really all that important. Either way, this is simply wasting time. Much of this book is devoted to the number-one, most important overarching habit, which happens to include four parts:

1. Identifying things that waste time.

2. Refraining from doing things that waste time.

3. Identifying things that are both effective in learning and an efficient use of your time.

4. Doing more of those things in #3.

MAKE YOUR STUDY EFFICIENT AND EFFECTIVE

This means you do what you must do to be the best student possible… and nothing more. This means that when you sit down to study, even if for short periods of time, you are getting the most from your time studying. If you can master this one principle and make it habitual, you will be successful. It seems easy, but as we all know, that doesn’t necessarily make it easy.

We live in a time where it is possible to be extremely efficient. Possible. Not probable. We all have gadgets to keep us connected with the world around us, and these gadgets can be used to make learning easier. This may seem weird to those of you reading this, but I remember the advent of the computer and the internet—not all that long ago—and saw specifically how learning and access to information became easier and easier. I remember trying to do research projects in high school and not really knowing how to use the internet to study. I remember turning to the libraries and being bogged down with the amount of available information and no easy way to sift through the wealth of information in libraries. And then, as the internet became more accessible and easy to use, and as credible websites with the same vast wealth of information that existed in libraries started to pop up, the research and learning processes became easier and much, much more efficient. Along with the internet came more powerful computers and software that allowed the student to excel without wasting time. No longer do we have to sift through mountains of books at the library, nor are we restricted to taking hand-written notes. We can easily type papers and edit them with word processors—and the tools only seem to expand with each new device.

Here’s an amusing assignment: ask a parent about writing papers on an actual typewriter. Then ask a grandparent about writing papers on a manual typewriter. This might be an eye-opener, as you realize that something we take for granted now—something as simple as centering text—used to be an annoying and time-consuming task, requiring counting the number of characters in each line to be centered, setting the typewriter to the center, and then counting backwards, manually, for one-half of those characters. For each line! Any mistakes? The entire sheet had to be redone.

This is an incredible time to be a student; efficiency is within our grasp! All it takes is a habit—a way of doing things that is reinforced by practice every day—to actually be efficient. And keep in mind what this means: being efficient means having more time to do what you would like to do, aside from learning whatever subject you’re studying. College Fast Track is not about denial. It’s about the opposite: learning well and quickly, preserving other time to relax without regret.

Efficient, effective study is the end goal, the most important goal, the crucial goal, the goal that will carry you through undergraduate successes and into your future successes.

--Derrick Hibbard, author of College Fast Track, and Law School Fast Track