My Journey to the New York Bar - Upped My Game

Now that I knew which areas of the substantive law I needed to strengthen my knowledge on, I got myself organised by creating a study plan. I really went to town with my study plan, setting out certain days of the week to study specific topics and divided each session between revising notes and doing both multiple choice questions and essay questions for each topic.

 The areas of law where I felt more confident in, I studied on the days I worked, whereas, the areas of law where I knew I needed to spend more time on, I used Thursdays and Fridays to focus on them as I was no longer working on those days.

I decided to take on board a suggestion given to me first time round which I initially dismissed. The suggestion was to wake up between an hour and a half to two hours early to studying before work. As a person who really likes her sleep, the thought of waking up at 5.30am to study before getting ready to go to work, was really difficult! I didn’t like the idea at all! I would rather sleep late and be up until 2 or 3 o' clock in the morning studying then wake up at 5.30am!!

However, when I thought about the benefits of doing this, I decided to do it. I had to be disciplined and go to sleep a little earlier than usual so that I had sufficient sleep. I mainly did this on the days that I worked in the office (which was Monday-Wednesday) because after work I knew I would only get a maximum of two to three hours of studying done, before my brain would want to retire for the night. I used the early mornings to revise notes and read through the text books and used the evenings to go through exam practice questions and review my answers (and make additional notes of the answers I got wrong so that I could revisit the topics).

This literally was my life for 10-12 weeks leading up to the exam! Study, work, church repeat.

I had already invested a lot of time and money into this and as I believed it was the path for me to take and succeed in, I had to see it through until the end and make the necessary sacrifices to achieve what I had initially set out to achieve.