Summer Series: Balancing your Responsibilities with the Bar

Our Summer Series continues! This series highlights different Latina students and law grads as they embark in their summer jobs and/or bar prep all across the country. We hope to provide a variety of work experiences, options for a healthy work-life balance, and general motivation through different guest contributors to help you to take charge of your summer and professional goals!  Today we hear from Ariana and her great tips on balancing your life responsibilities while studying for the bar!

My name is Ariana, I just graduated law school and I’m currently studying for the NY & NJ bar exams this July. In addition to having a big Dominican family, I also had a baby boy my summer of 2L, so balancing law school with family was always a prominent concern.

During Law school and bar-prep your life is supposed to consist of just that: law school and bar-prep. The truth is that everyone has a different reality, but it just makes it that much more scary when you have to deal with family, children, spouses, financial responsibilities, etc. in addition to law school and bar exams. Even though it’s intimidating, it is also doable! I’ve created a list of tips that can make balancing  work and family a little easier and hopefully maximize your professional productivity and quality time at home.

1. PLAN AHEAD.

Planning in advance is a key factor in successfully balancing law school/bar-prep (which I will use interchangeably) and family. Because we’re often juggling so many different things, it’s easy to forget a deadline or commitment. For me, having a good planner each school year was a must. In addition to the day-to-day tasks, I would really utilize the monthly calendar pages to input upcoming commitments (from birthday parties and weddings to dentist appointments, you name it) and highlight these. Having a visual of your schedule  will do two things for you:

1) Help you plan ahead so you can make up the time you’re not able to study; and most importantly  2) Make you realize that you actually have to sacrifice some activities.

2. BE REALISTIC

This immediately follows the point above. Do NOT convince yourself that you can do it all. Instead, be realistic about time constraints and just how much time activities actually take. My husband always said I had a bad perception of time and I realized he was right because whenever I found myself overwhelmed with tasks, I would realize it was often due to poor time allocation. When scheduling studies or events, aim on the safe side. You will always be happier by allocating too much time to one task than not enough; you don’t want to end up swamped by last-minute cramming or worse, not getting to a task at all.

You also have to be realistic about your personal circumstances. Whether you’re starting law school, still trying to get the hang of it, or in the midst of bar-prep (aka hell), you will feel inadequate if you can’t follow the schedule that everyone else is following. The first step to overcoming this hurdle? Acknowledgement! Once you recognize and come to terms with the fact that your life and circumstances are different than that of others, you can move on to step two: working around it and making it happen.

For me, this realization came very early-on in law school. I would rush home after class but instead of doing work I would feel tired from the infinite NYC subway commute, get distracted cooking dinner, packing lunches, tidying up the place, turning on the tv, etc. If like me you can’t get much work done at home, that’s fine. And that brings me to my next point:

3. HAVE A ROUTINE.

For me, not being able to do much work at home meant staying at school for a couple of hours after my classes ended, and arriving early every morning. This is the classic “treat it like a job” approach, and it’s actually crucial if you’re trying to balance family and law school. A good routine will allow you to easily make up the hours that you can’t put in at home, and you’ll actually be pleasantly surprised with the amount and quality of work you can “bang out” by focusing without distractions. Knowing your work is done will also increase the quality of your personal life by  allowing you to be physically and mentally present at home, which everyone will appreciate.

During bar-prep, this is simply a MUST.

4. GIVE YOURSELF EXTRA TIME

Last but definitely not least, give yourself extra time. Even if you plan ahead and do so realistically, things will come up. Again: through no fault of your own, if you have a significant other, children or family that rely on you in any way, things WILL come up. Accept it, and most importantly don’t get thrown off by it. Your best bet will always be to allocate additional time to your professional tasks so that if unexpected things come up, you will still be able to handle it. I recently experienced the unpleasant consequences of not having a time cushion when I started bar-prep on the recommended date. Things came up (as they always do) and I lost 3 days right at the start. All is fine now, but had I scheduled-in a comfortable cushion given my personal responsibilities, I wouldn’t have gotten thrown off!

During bar-prep, also remember to literally give yourself extra time. It is no joke when they say “it’s a marathon, not a sprint” so if you’re done with all your bar-prep tasks for the night, just take the time to relax. It can be tempting to just do insert desired activity here after all, but that will usually require time and energy that you really need for the next day.

I know it’s all easier said than done, but I encourage you to give these tips a try. If you can only take two things away from this post, please take the following:

1) It’s ok to have more and/or different responsibilities from your colleagues. Instead of focusing on the difficulties, just focus on working with it and through it.

2) You can do it. The very circumstances that make this journey challenging are also your motivation to keep working harder every day.

Happy studying!

xoxo

Ari