The Honest Truth About Doing A Law Degree...

There are a lot of misconceptions about doing a degree in law… “you have to stay up all night doing work” … “the work is so hard” … “you should attend every lecture” etc. Well I’m here to separate the fact from the fiction. Some of these may surprise you, some might not, but if you are thinking about doing a law degree, they might also put your mind at ease. These are my honest truths about doing a degree in Law!

No – one reads the reading lists!

Okay, so at the start of the year you will receive a ‘recommended reading list’ which has what feels like 200 books and texts on it. I’ll be honest I don’t know anyone that even looked the full reading list. If a text is important to your work, your lecturers will tell you. If you need to read a specific text for homework, the lecturer will tell you. There’s no point reading the entire reading list because 70% of it is irrelevant and you won’t need it for your studies. There will usually be core textbooks, and these are what you will use the most. Reading lists aren’t mandatory!

Textbooks are ridiculously expensive!

One thing I was surprised about, was how expensive textbooks were. Mine were £150 for 5 and I never touched 2 of them. It was actually kind of annoying because we were told we needed these books and they were mandatory, but as I said, 2 of the textbooks were completely useless and work was never ever set from them. However, every week we had reading to do from the other 3 (I never did it though because it was like 30 pages and the font was so tiny I just couldn’t read something that boring for that long). Also, they are helpful for revision, so my advice is to buy them and then hopefully next year you can sell them to first years and get your money back.

Some lectures are pointless!

Yep. There were so many times where I either attended a pointless lecture or saw that it was going to be pointless and didn’t attend anyway. There were two ‘mindset’ lectures throughout the year that were so incredibly pointless I can’t even explain. More than anything it was frustrating because if I hadn’t gone to the lecture I could have gone home for Christmas two days early.

Try and Prepare for your seminars…

Bit of an obvious one but trust me I know how easy it is to become lazy, especially when the tutor just goes through it all in the seminar anyway. BUT, there’s nothing more awkward than when a tutor does pick on you for an answer and you have no idea what’s going on….

Workload can be hard!

As to be expected, sometimes work does stack up. Especially at the end of terms you may have 3 pieces of coursework due within 2 weeks of each other, but I never once did an ‘all-nighter’, I never stayed up past 8pm doing work, it’s all manageable. Don’t go thinking you’ll have no time for yourself because I still had time to watch all 4 seasons of Fresh Meat and all seasons of Outnumbered (as well as many many many other programmes), and that was just the first term…

Some modules will be hella boring and hella hard…

*cough* Land law *cough*.

Teachers can be so unhelpful!!!!

This is probably the most frustrating thing considering you’re paying over £9000 to be there. Some lecturers just can’t be arsed. There have been so many occasions where I have been very stuck (homework was not clear etc) and the lecturers just refer you to lecture notes or moodle etc. I had a lecturer last year that literally just shouted at us for the entire hour… no I’m not joking! She was genuinely awful, if you got something even slightly wrong she would ridicule you I front of the entire class, fairs to say by the end of the year only a few people were turning up to her sessions. But not everyone is like that, the majority are lovely and are more than happy to help.

GROUP WORK IS FORCED.

Urghhhhhhhh. Yeah so group work is a nightmare because no one wants to seem like a try hard, but there always people that just simply don’t give a shit and won’t turn up or help at all. At Portsmouth however, if you don’t participate you get 5% deducted from your coursework which really is so annoying.

Public Speaking and Presentations are frequent…

I’m ngl, I hate public speaking, I go bright red and I get so worried that people will laugh at me, it’s awful, but you can’t get out of it I’m afraid. My advice would to not take yourself too seriously and just get it over with. If you really hate it, just do the minimum because at my uni, our presentations never usually count for anything, so it doesn’t matter. Most of the time the tutors will be just glad you turned up… However, if you do have a module that is marked, just try your best because you don’t want a bad mark. A lot of people don’t turn up for presentations and for me that was great because I preferred to present to a group of 6 people rather than 25!

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On more than one occasion I felt like giving up law. During the first few months I really struggled to understand certain modules and I felt as if I wasn’t enjoying the course at all. However, I stuck at it and it did get better and I really enjoyed it (obviously some of the modules still felt like such a waste of time, but the rest were good), so if you get there and don’t enjoy it, keep going, don’t give up it might get much better! In the first few months especially, it will probably feel very overwhelming and that can make everything else feel so much worse. I hope you’ve enjoyed this post, let me know what you thought!

A x