Anna Erickson ’26

• Northeastern has a housing portal which is helpful for finding roommates and apartments. Any Northeastern student, undergraduate or graduate, can use the portal and put in their preferences to find roommates who match what you are looking for.
• There are also Facebook pages that many people use, which is how I found my roommates. My law school class had its own page where people posted looking for roommates, but there are other pages for broader searches in the Boston area.
• My biggest recommendation is to live with other graduate students. The law school lifestyle is much different than what working adults are up to, so it is nice to live with others who understand when you have to do homework at 7 p.m. or have to go to the library on Saturday afternoons.

How to find housing

• Start looking as soon as possible! Rentals go on and off the market quickly, and you don’t want to miss out. Boston leases typically start September 1, and some people sign as early as January. The sooner you get started, the more likely you are to find what you are looking for.
• If you are looking to be within walking distance to campus, Mission Hill, Fenway, South End and Back Bay are the neighborhoods surrounding Northeastern where students tend to live. If you are okay with taking the T or the bus, many students choose to live in Brookline, Allston, Jamaica Plain, South Boston (Southie) and Cambridge.
• After you know where you want to reside, the Northeastern Housing portal is a great place to start. It is a collaboration with apartments.com, which is also where you can focus your search. Like any other housing resource, it allows you to narrow your search to specific accommodations you want, whether it’s laundry in-unit, a pet friendly unit, or parking.

What to know about housing in Boston

• As soon as you find a place, be ready to make a deposit on the place. This will typically include a broker’s fee (equivalent to one month’s rent), a security deposit, first month’s rent, and last month’s rent. Especially if you are using a site like apartments.com, it is usually unavoidable to sign a lease without going through a broker.
• Make sure to confirm what utilities you are responsible for as a tenant. If you are living in an apartment with electric heat that you must pay for, it can add $100s to your monthly living expenses. Finding a place where some of or all the utilities are included can save money.
• Many places are owned by property management companies that are not always acting in your best interest. Know your rights as a tenant and be ready to use your lawyering skills to advocate for yourself if they are not following the law or the lease!

Getting settled in Boston

• Once the fun of finding housing is done, start planning your move to the city. Are you going to pack everything in suitcases and fly? Or are you going to load up a U-Haul and drive into the city? Are you going to need to stay in a hotel for a couple days? Is anyone going to join you? The earlier you start figuring things out, the cheaper everything will be.
• After you arrive in Boston and are all moved in, start exploring! It is so fun to live in a new city and to find your new favorite restaurants, coffee shops, or things to do. Although law school is time consuming, it is important to continue living life and doing what you enjoy.

Here is a snapshot of what our class’s orientation looked like last fall:

As you can see, orientation started before September 1st leases. Make sure to plan where you will be living before you can move in, whether it’s getting a hotel or Airbnb for a week, staying with friends or family, etc.

Classes

In the fall, you will take torts, property and civil procedure as your doctrinal courses. These are courses that will be tested on the bar exam after you graduate. Along with these courses, you will be in legal research and writing for your entire 1L year, where you will learn to research and write like a lawyer! It was an extremely helpful course, because of the hands-on experience of writing legal briefs and memos, while also getting some oral argument practice in the spring semester. These skills will be the most valuable when you go on co-op. Unlike other law schools, Northeastern Law offers another 1L course called Legal Skills in a Social Context (LSSC), which you take for your entire 1L year. You will be with about 13 of your classmates in a “law office”, and your law office will be assigned a social justice community project to work on for the year.

In the spring, you will take criminal law, constitutional law and contracts.

Schedule

One of the most important skills in law school is time management. It won’t take long for you to figure out your class schedule and to find what time works best for you to get your work done outside of class. Your class schedule will depend on what section you are in. Each 1L class is split into a green section, a blue section and a red section, with around 70 students in each section, depending on the class size. Each section has its own schedule, where you will be attending your doctrinal courses three times a week with your section. On top of your doctrinal courses, you will have your legal research and writing class and your LSSC law office meeting once a week.

Here is a snapshot of a week in my life as a 1L:

I got into the habit of making my schedule for the week to know when I had class and when I could get my readings done, while also setting aside time for things like meal prepping and going to the gym. You will learn what works best for you, and how to find time to keep doing things you enjoy outside of school.

1. Time management, time management and more time management.

During your first year, you will be enrolled in five classes, so you will be on campus most likely everyday Monday through Friday. Once you get your class schedule, I would recommend putting it into your calendar, whether it’s a planner, iCal or Google Calendar, or one you hang on the wall in your bedroom. The rest of your responsibilities will revolve around when you will be in class every day. It worked best for me to set aside time each weekend to set up my schedule for the week to see what needed to get done and when I was going to have time to do each task. You will also figure out how long it will take you to do each assignment. For example, ten pages of reading would usually take me almost an hour in the beginning of the semester. Therefore, I knew how much time I would need to set aside for each assignment to get done in time. I also knew when I did my best work during the day. After being in class for over five hours on Mondays, it was hard to muster the brain power to do four more hours of reading. With that in mind, I would do extra work on the weekends to lighten my course load during the week, or I would get up early before class. While this is what works for me, it is different for everyone. You will develop your own time management skills and figure out how you will balance the work, along with saving time to do other things you enjoy doing!

2. How to prepare for class

Instead of turning in an assignment every day or being quizzed every week, most of your classes in law school will not require you to submit any homework throughout the semester. Most of your preparation for class will be doing the readings for the day. You will get a syllabus for each class, and you will most likely stick to the assigned reading every day, unless your professor amends it at any point. Each of your professors will have their own teaching style, but they all will expect you to show up to class with a thorough understanding of the reading, so you are ready to follow along with the lecture and to participate in class discussions. They will also make it clear how they do cold calls. Some may call on anyone whenever they want, others may have a group of students on call each day and others may not ever do cold calls. You will figure out your professors’ cold calling style, which will also influence how you prepare for class. Although you are rarely tested on your understanding of the material, it is important to read for every class and to develop study habits that will ensure you are ready for class. Whether it’s highlighting in the textbook or taking notes by hand or on your laptop, it is beneficial to have something to go to class with and to have as study material for each topic in the course.

3. Getting ready for finals

The more work you do during the semester in terms of reading, note taking, reviewing and learning from your professors and teaching assistants, the more prepared you will be when it is time for finals. For your three doctrinal courses in the fall, you will have in person tests that are each three or four hours long. Luckily, you will have one week after classes are done before your first final. Then the exams are spaced out over the course of a week and a half.

During orientation, you will start hearing the professors and upperclassmen talk about “outlining,” and it is okay if you don’t know what they’re talking about. Essentially, outlining is a study guide you make for each class to study for or use during your final. It’s like a study guide. Some people will start working on outlines early in the semester, others may wait until classes are done to start theirs and others might not even make an outline. I found that working on the outline is a great way to start studying for finals, so I waited until the semester was almost done to start working on mine. Beyond studying your own notes and outline, your TAs will host review sessions that are great to use as structures for your outlines. Different online resources, like Barbri or Themis, are also helpful in supplementing your review materials. Once you are done with your outline, the greatest way to prepare is to take practice exams. Most of your professors have past exams that are available on the school’s exam repository. I tried to do a couple of these for each class before the final. It is also helpful to form a study group to go over these exams together to bounce ideas off each other or to review material in general. Once again, you will develop your own strategies, and some may work better for you than others.