The Story
I have a human biology lecture at 12:40, and I am studying for it at noon: it’s the only window I have in the day. Before that, I attended psychology class across campus. After that lecture, I have to go to the gym, spend an hour on this newsletter, and then go to work. As you can guess, and as you probably have experienced yourself, being a university student is a lot. This isn’t even a bad week, or a particularly hard day. That’s what average student life looks like.
I genuinely didn’t expect college to be like this. I came into my first year with all the planners and calendars one girl could ever need, and a notes app full of goals. I wasn’t realistic about the entire picture: you may still feel behind, yet so far away at the same time.
I came into my sophomore year with a vision board. I did not come in with a plan.
For a long time, I thought the answer to managing all of my tasks was pure motivation. That if I wanted it badly enough, everything would get done. Well, some days that’s true. Others, not so much. Motivation tends to show up strong on Sunday at about 10 pm, and be completely drained by Wednesday afternoon. You cannot build a plan on a feeling that comes and goes.
The Honest Advice
What works for GPA, LSAT prep, and anything else is replacing decisions with structure. Easier said than done, right? Structure isn’t glamorous, but when you’re exhausted, you don’t want to have to figure out what needs to happen next. You want to know.
A few things that have genuinely helped me since starting college:
Know where your GPA actually stands, not where you think it does. Track it by semester, because there is a real difference between “I think I’m around a 3.7” and knowing your exact cumulative. Law school applications will always run on exact numbers.
I want you to know the risks of taking a course every semester. It seems obvious, but you also have to be honest with yourself. Talk to your friends, your professors, and your advisors, and know the honest, brutal truth about every course you take. Which courses will need more effort? Which classes are fairly light? Catching a slipping grade before midterms is so vital, and a completely different problem than trying to resurrect your grade after midterms.
A W is better than a C. This one actually took me a while to believe. How could withdrawing from a class be better than simply getting a bad grade? As much as I find it hard to admit to myself that I need to drop a class, the drop deadline exists for a reason, so use it.
Don’t overload the same semester you’re doing serious LSAT prep. This is a hard one, especially if you are anything like me and want to graduate early and move on to the next phase of your life. I am going to plan my course around the LSAT timeline to avoid burnout, therefore strengthening the schedule over a motivation mindset.
The Real Talk
The overwhelm doesn’t go away. However, I can safely say writing and scheduling my weeks out has served as a baseline for prioritizing due dates and managing my grades, while also allowing me to think ahead about the LSAT and to be a human being with exciting experiences.
The students who make it aren’t the ones who happened to be the most motivated. They’re the people who kept going on days when motivation didn’t exist. The way you do that isn’t by simply having “more discipline”— whatever that even looks like. It’s by making fewer decisions in the moment. Work has to be scheduled, and priorities have to be clear. If you plan once when you have the capacity, you don’t have to worry about making decisions when you don’t.
The goal isn’t to feel motivated every day. The goal is to not need to.
Easier said than done, but I believe in you and me. Even if you aren’t a pre-law student, you are still a highly accomplished person who grows every day. I challenge you to pick one thing you’ve been managing in your head this week and put it somewhere real. Write it down, make it a note, put it in a doc, or whatever works best for you. Just get it out of your head and into a system.