Congratulations on making it to NUS Law (or commiserations, if you actually wanted to go elsewhere but had to settle). Your time here will be much easier if you don’t do what I did. My hard-won lessons, below:

Law Camp/Orientation

I didn’t go, and neither did any of my friends, but that’s because we’re old and weary and we also had to serve our notice periods at work. Go, make friends, and you will at least not have to sit in lectures alone. If you don’t go, it’s not the end of the world. I mean, you’re going to be seeing these people nearly every day in school, and there are extracurricular groups to join.

Pre-reading

There are some books that are recommended for incoming law students, because law school is so different from whatever came before. These are more like friendly guides – a Lonely Planet guidebook for law school, if you will. For a US-centric view, try “Getting to Maybe”, and for a UK classic, “Learning the Law” by Glanville Williams. I only recently got my hands on “Learning the Law” and I regret not reading it earlier (I learned about it at the end of year 1). Also, to get you used to reading cases: The Singapore Law Watch and Supreme Court websites, so you can read judgments and get a feel for things.

Textbooks

Buy one for each subject. Just one. You won’t have time to read more than one. Get the entire set from seniors at an eye-watering price, or hold on to find out which ones your profs recommend. Also an alternative: Book Depository, for textbooks from UK writers, and Carousell or other used-book databases. This will also give you a good gauge of the secondhand prices.

Also, it’s not compulsory to buy textbooks. I had no choice but to buy my Criminal Law textbooks because the profs referred to it all the time, but this was not really the case for Torts and Contract. Textbooks can be heavy-going when you’re a freshman, and a friendly writing style can be more important than the eminence of the author. In the end, what matters is that you get value out of the book, and there’s no value in a book you never open.

Note-taking

Some people swear by taking notes in longhand with a fountain pen, others type furiously to capture every nuance of the prof’s words. I’ve tried both, and frankly it doesn’t matter as long as you read them after the lesson, read them again before doing the tutorial assignments, and then one more time to distill them down into your exam cheatsheets.

Outlines/muggers

The main advantage of being close to your orientation group is that your generous seniors will have compiled muggers for you – basically their notes from the year before, condensed and exam-ready. Some people take a hard line against muggers, seeing them as the equivalent of baby food, while others become connoisseurs of which set is the best for which prof’s class. I prefer to make my own notes because I use the Cornell method, but muggers can get you out of a tight spot if you’re not prepared. A caveat though – if you don’t update the muggers you get, you may recite an error or mention a case that isn’t on your syllabus any more, at which point the prof will know that you’re cribbing. The profs know about muggers and they try to discourage us, but like movie piracy, it’s something (nearly) everyone is doing.

Workload

You have 15 contact hours a week. That means 15 hours of instruction, whether in a lecture, seminar or tutorial group. To put things in perspective, that’s 3 hours a day, 5 days a week. Seems light, until you remember that the faculty’s rule of thumb is 3 hours of preparation for every hour of instruction. That’s 45 hours of prep on top of your 15 contact hours, for a total of 60 hours of work a week.

That’s not terrible, by the way. Working adults routinely clock 50-hour weeks, and lawyers definitely clock more than 60 hours a week during crunch time. Might as well get used to the grind now.

I never did 60 hours a week, actually. But you don’t want to be me, so pick your favourite table at the library and settle in.

Tutorials

Show up prepared. Read the cases (or at least the headnotes). Think through the questions. Coming from a liberal arts background where you could just improvise your answer, I found tutorials frightening at first. But you, unlike me, are a hardworking, conscientious student and you will prepare for tutorials, because this is where most of the value of law school lies – understanding that there may be many ways to look at a problem, and sussing out which approach your prof prefers. After all, we have exams to pass.

Exams

Ah, exams. They come in many forms in law school. You can write essays, type furiously with the clock ticking away, do a take-home exam that gives you 6 hours to churn out an essay or two, or do a research paper. Okay, so the last one is an assessment and not an exam, but when it counts for more than 50% of your final grade, it’s just as important and scary.

E-exams took some getting used to. In my undergrad days, I spent significant time drafting my answers to get the flow of ideas just right, because we had to write by hand and waiting for correction fluid to dry was a drain on precious time. With e-exams, that goes straight out the window. Points can be rearranged or edited instantly, so meticulous drafting is replaced by terse bullet points just so I’m sure I didn’t miss out details. I took my last handwritten exam in April 2016. I don’t miss them.

For some modules, like LARC (Legal Analysis and Communication) and Trial Advocacy, there is a final “practical exam” in the form of a moot, or a mock trial. Basically, this is your chance to play lawyer and make submissions to a “court”, usually made up of your profs. It is nerve-wracking, time-consuming, and some people actually enjoy this so much that they do moots as an extracurricular. You get all types in law school.

Moots

Mooters are the rock stars of law school. Being a mooter means standing up in front of a crowd, making arguments, and impressing the socks off everyone. Not everyone is cut out to be a mooter – some of us really don’t like public speaking (not all lawyers are chatterboxes). And it’s common knowledge that while law school skews towards churning out litigators (hence the focus on moots), legal practice needs all types. Just find your niche and make the most of it.

Well-being

When I was an undergrad, discussion of mental health issues was practically nonexistent. Maybe we were just more relaxed back then, I can’t tell. But now, mental health is a big issue on campus and we are always reminded that there’s a counsellor available if we need help. Law school is probably an especially tough place for mental health, because the stress is higher and it can be hard to tell if you just need some time to get used to the pace, or if something is really wrong. Also, everyone else will tell you how stressed they are, which normalizes something that might be a symptom. You know yourself best – if you’re manifesting symptoms of anxiety or depression, seek help.

Law school is filled with Type-A sorts who let off steam by crushing each other at foosball or table tennis. As a more aesthetic type, I prefer walks in the gardens around the campus, or calligraphy. Your studies are important, but your hobbies will keep you sane and allow you to decompress so you can study better.

Remember, law school is tough but you’re tougher. All the best!

Lawyer training, in many ways, is similar to raising a baby. *cue eye-rolling from billions of parents*

I feel as though I’m raising a baby lawyer – right now I am growing the lawyer I want to become, but that idea-lawyer is still very much a baby and as the progenitor, it’s basically all long days and sleepless nights and a lot of poopy diapers to clean up. Endless poopy diapers. Just non-stop.

And then once in a while the law-baby does something amazing (or rather, I find an absolutely fascinating facet of the law that leaves me marvelling at it for a while) and it’s like that moment when your baby smiles at you. This is my law-baby smiling at me.

And I hope that someday the poopy diapers will decrease and eventually stop, and there will be more smiles, and the law-baby will grow to the point of being somewhat independent and I’ll know all the slogging would have been worth it.

But right now, it’s just poopy diapers and it’s just something I’ll have to deal with in the process of raising (becoming) a lawyer I can be proud of.

Another one of the GLBs left the programme last week. He has a Master’s degree from Yale, I don’t think he’ll be left jobless for long – I guess he just burned out after having been a student for so long. Not 100% sure on his reasons – he just decided law wasn’t for him.

And yet the more I see people leave, the more convinced I am that the law IS for me, mediocre grades notwithstanding. I like the digging through old bound journals, knowing that if I don’t do a decent job, the intern at the opposing law firm will find a case that blows ours to smithereens. I like the intellectual exercise even though I am still shite at it. Above all, I like how honest the profession is (yes, snicker all you want). We’re not shy about gunning for the best-paying jobs or about the fact that some parts of the profession are bullshit, but it’s bullshit we all have to collude upon in order to keep the system running, because sometimes it feels as though we are the last bastion of order in a world collapsing from entropy.

Our networking session with the mentors last Friday helped to cement this view. Sure I’m not going to rise to the top of the judiciary without a First Class honours degree and a sharp legal mind, but I can be good enough to make a better living than I would have had at TLL, even accounting for opportunity costs. And most of all, I will no longer have to excuse myself for merely being a “tuition teacher”, because I realise now that was my subconscious shame at taking the easy way out in life. Lawyering is SOOOOO not the easy way out.

Getting used to law school is like going through JC all over again.

When I arrived in 2002 to do my A-Levels in Victoria Junior College, I had no friends from the same school, unlike the majority of my classmates. My weird uniform singled me out, and I didn’t understand the lingo.

Now, 13 years later, I have no classmates whom I know from JC or NS, unlike my freshman classmates. I just look older than the undergrads – I’ve been recognised off-campus by people I don’t know at all. It’s like a strange sort of unwanted celebrity.

And just like in JC, I’m struggling with the material. I got used to seeing Cs and Ds on my report card all throughout JC, even though they eventually translated into stellar exam grades at the finals. I don’t think I can fall back on that now – there isn’t a larger cohort out there to boost the curve, we are the entire population and it’s a shark tank. It’s not even the competitiveness I’m worried about – I objectively do not get the material. You could remove the top half of the cohort and I’d still be getting shit grades because WHAT IS LEGAL ANALYSIS?

Also, as previously stated, I have been slacking off and I am trying to remedy that (though I’ll be the first to admit I’m not exactly throwing myself at the work). In JC I busied myself playing with the original Sims game – now the distractions are Diablo 3 and dance. I’m trying to pick up the pace and clear some backlog before recess week, when I hope to make an actual effort and clear the entire backlog before the second half of the semester begins.

bleaaaaghhh why do I always take the circuitous route blaaaargh.

They warned us we would be drowning. They did.

I’m just doing my best to keep paddling because I spent the first 3 weeks doing less than the bare minimum and now I have to catch up. It’s less of a time issue and more of a laziness issue, I admit. And it’s not even as though I’m completely overwhelmed by the work. Focus a bit harder, leave off the social media for longer, keep the gaming to weekends, and bring out the tablet so I can read cases and textbooks while commuting.

All the GLBs are just waiting for recess week so we can catch up on some sleep and all the backlog of readings and cases… and come up for air.

SMU’s email came on a Thursday morning as I lay in bed checking my phone. I immediately sent off an email to my parents and my colleagues.

Half an hour later, as I was getting ready for work, an SMS came in from NUS admissions saying my status had been updated. The link took me to student login where the magic words “you have been offered” sat above “Graduate Law Programme”.

Another hasty email to parents.

By the time I got to the office, they were full of congratulations. I had already submitted my notice earlier that week but they obviously had not got the news, because HR works in slow and mysterious ways…

The handover for my replacement will be a rushed affair but he will have others to guide him along so… I’m outta here!

The cats have taken to waking me up at 6am, which is uncomfortably close to my actual alarm time of 7am. I can’t go back to sleep in case I oversleep and miss a lecture (or worse, a tutorial). I’ve been tanking all week but it’s Saturday now.

So what do I do instead of sleeping in? I sign up to spectate moots. In Chinatown. At 9 in the morning.

I kept yawning throughout the mock trial while fidgeting uncomfortably on the hard plastic chair. It took a lot of brainpower to keep up with the arguments without any visual aids.

After court adjourned for the judges to deliberate, I left to take the bus home. At least it was a direct bus, thank goodness for small mercies.

From here on out, I’m only signing my Saturdays away if I stand to benefit significantly.

Way back in 2004, I did one pre-admission checkup so I knew roughly what to expect. In fact, I had it simpler this time around as I was a PR and didn’t need to get a blood test for the student pass.

The process was a tad chaotic though. I suspect they hired students to run the simpler stations such as the vision test and ferrying the documents from the urine test centre to the X-ray centre. As such, instructions were not clear at times. I had no idea how to wear the hospital gown because I’m accustomed to the ones that overlap and tie at the side, but they used the old-style ones which tie in the back.

At some point, the young man next to me was told that they couldn’t find his urine sample… and it’s not as though many of us can provide another sample so soon after emptying our bladder. They found it in the end, so it turned out well for him.

I was assigned to Dr Catherine Chua for the last part of the checkup. She asked if I was still being followed up for my lymphoma, and after I said yes, she ticked the “fit for admission” column so I could rest easy. I told her my specialist was at NUH, and when I gave her his name she related some anecdotes. It was fun. I’m sure she found my medical history interesting and a welcome diversion from the run-of-the-mill students she gets 90% of the time.

She was kind enough to enquire about the course and wished me well, so that’s one hurdle crossed for me. I did have my worries if they might consider me unfit for admission but I guess I was worrying for nothing, as usual.