Brown Boy Goes to Law School

So at one of the schools I was very interested in, I was offered to either start as a part-time student in the fall, or wait until the spring and start full-time.

I’ve been researching the whole part-time thing, and here are the facts I’ve collected, and the conclusions I’ve come to:

• The professors will be the same.
• Your degree will be the exact same.
• I will have more time to study and my first year will be a notch less intense, which could be good given my personality. Also, more time to adjust to the big new city.
• First-year grades are the most important. Period. And so taking those first-year courses over a longer period of time will lower the stress and improve the potential for doing better in those courses. The Assistant Dean of Admissions, who graduated from that law school, said that he sometimes wishes that he was part-time, for this very reason.
• I will have more time to network with lawyers and judges in the area. This is VERY important, especially if I’m wanting to work in that city. I could be improving my job prospects going part-time.
• I will be able to work and gain more work experience that I wouldn’t have gained as a full-time student, hopefully a small job with a law firm or judge?
• I will be eligible to transfer to the full-time program after a semester, and no longer than after earning 30 credit hours (which means being there for two fall semesters). So this part-time thing could be for only one semester, and no more than 1.5 years.

These are the questions that are still on my mind:

• Will I still have the same access to moot court, law review and student organizations? I spoke with the Assistant Dean of Admissions, and asked him what effect going part-time would have on student organizations, moot court and so on. He said: none at all. The opportunities are the same. Any many of the student organizations require you to have X amount of coursework completed before you do it (like moot court/trial advocacy), so you would have progressed into full-time by then anyways.
• How does this effect job prospects? This question is open to debate. Some say it helps your job prospects, some say it hurts. Hmmm…