Survival tips for law students with Ji Burton

By Ji Burton

Surviving as a Law student is all about trial and error. We asked one of our young and upcoming solicitors, Ji Burton about the tips and tricks he developed throughout his studies to assist you. Ji Joined the Connolly Suthers team in 2018 after graduating with a Bachelor of Laws (Honours) and a Bachelor of Business (Accounting) from James Cook University. He now works within our litigation department assisting with personal compensation and superannuation claims. So without further ado here are Ji's top tips! 

Transcribe those recordings

It’s no secret Lecturers only want to read on an exam paper what they’ve taught you throughout the Semester. Taking the time to accurately transcribe a Lecture can be tedious and very time consuming (with lots of pausing and rewinding), but is always a very rewarding task when it comes time for SWOTVAC. Stay on top of these and it will make your SWOTVAC a lot more productive! You will actually have time to absorb and apply your material to practice exams.

Practice exams

Often hidden away in online Library resources are past exams for specific subjects. A few minutes of reading will often uncover certain patterns and trends as to what questions you could very well expect in your exam. Knowing the style of questioning can go a long way to making sure you aren’t surprised by your lecturer’s newfound love for ‘waffly’ and long-winded questions in an exam. With those transcribed notes from throughout the Semester (see above), your best use of SWOTVAC will be answering those practice exams, timing yourself and training your brain to know just how much detail each 10, 15 or 5 mark question requires.

Groups

Transcribing lectures, preparing for tutorials and studying for exams takes up a lot of time. In the time it takes one person to finalise their notes from a week 13 lecture, a group will have negotiated one person to do this, another to prepare the perfect tutorial answer and another to write a practice answer to that topic’s exam question.

Lecture Slides

The first tip I received from my Mentor in O-Week turned out to be the most tedious yet beneficial tip going around. Converting your Lecturer’s Power Point slides to Microsoft Word sounds simple enough, but by doing so it will allow your work to flow. Unlike powerpoint, you can adapt your word documents further. For me, some of these adaptations included modifying slide headings to ‘Heading 1’ and then automatically generating a table of contents for each lecture. Also changing the colour of your typed notes will help you decipher lecture materials from what the lecturer actually wanted to tell you. Where you see a lack of colour often tells you the lecturer isn’t too concerned about this specific part of the lecture and will most likely not reappear anytime soon (such as in the exam).

Tutorials

If there is any class you don’t want to skip, it’s the tutorial. More often than not exam questions are, but for a few minor changes to names, exactly as they appeared in that tutorial six weeks before. I can’t recall a subject where exam questions have nearly mirrored tutorial questions. Having detailed notes on how to answer each tutorial question will pay dividends in the exam.

Also remember that life experience is just as important as an education, employers look for well-rounded people who can interact well with clients and work well as part of a team. 

To those good students who took the time to read this, your future is looking bright!
We wish you all the best with your studies.