Blog Entry 15

*sigh* Another weekend bites the dust…

Today, I woke up at nine, ate some breakfast and hit the books. Last night, I stayed up late working on my torts outline, and it is looking pretty complete. Today, my focus has been on my property outline; it’s definitely a work in progress. (I decided the most logical way to go about outlining was to do them in order of when my finals were…) While I know I won’t have some semblance of an outline for each class as I had hoped, I feel pretty optimistic about my timing. If I can get my torts and property more or less done this weekend, I can focus on civpro and contracts over Thanksgiving and have my outlines done before the end of classes (which, according to our “succeeding in law school” outling workshop, should be the goal).

I’ve had to be pretty on top of things today because I am working 5p-11p at Bath and Body Works tonight. I haven’t worked the sales floor since June, and I’m working on Black Friday, so I have an hour refresher on register and then we have a floorset to change up our table displays. It should be a nice break.

I am sure you are all interested to hear about the outling process, so here goes. Basically, your outline is a chance for you to piece together all of the things you have learning, figure out how the concepts and cases fit together and really make sure you understand the information before you head into the final. Based on my observations of my classmates, a lot of their focus is on the finished product, making sure that they have a good study guide for the final. While I think that’s true to some extent, I think it is really about the process more than anything else. (Think about it, if it were all about the finished product, why would past students be so willing to share their outlines? Why would the school bookstore sell commercial outlines?) My process is probably one of the more eccentric ones. I start with a more visual approach (as you can see from a portion of my torts outline in the picture) and literally connect ideas that way. Then, I use what I’ve created and type everything out cleanly to create a more practical study tool. At the same time though, I know people who are able to just sit down at their computer and work out the concepts while they are typing…whatever works.

And now, it’s back to outline #2…