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Beyond that, you're on your own. Depending on your major, you'll have free choice of as many as half of the courses you'll take before graduation. When you do your planning each semester, keep in mind that you are building a four-year transcript that will become a kind of resume; the courses you take describe the kind of person you are. You want that resume to proclaim that you are a person with broad interests who has studied many subjects, who isn't afraid of challenges, and who isn't too narrowly specialized.
Or you can follow a different strategy and choose electives for their subject matter alone. Each of the BGE fields has specific law-related topics. Political science electives, for example, will include constitutional and administrative law as well as courses in court organization and judicial behavior. In sociology there are courses in criminology and deviance, which are of value to students contemplating careers in criminal law, and other courses in family behavior, of value to students interested in family law. Business programs offer courses in law and society. As you learn the student folklore at your undergraduate institution, you'll be encouraged to take some of these courses that are said to be of value to law students.
One of the values of mentoring programs, of prelaw clubs, or of talking to alumni who are now law students or lawyers is that these contacts can steer you toward undergraduate coursework that will make your law school years easier. Your academic adviser can help you identify these courses, as can the campus prelaw adviser. In fact, the prelaw adviser may keep a list.
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Student folklore is also a useful guide to coursework, though you have to take it with a grain of salt, and you may have to do some digging to find out what is really useful. When I was in college, older students often advised prelaw students to take mammalian anatomy, a biology course then a prerequisite for medical school. The course consisted of memorizing the names of bones, muscles, nerves, and arteries of various mammals; students were required to dissect a cat. I don't know if any law student has ever had to know these details. I rather doubt it. But the course was useful because it taught people how to memorize lists of unfamiliar words and how to organize memorized information for easy recall. Law students have to remember the names of cases and have to be able to recall all the cases that bear on a particular legal problem. If your memory is poor, you'd be well advised to give some attention to strengthening it, and such a course would be one way to do it. (Poetry courses, constitutional law, and many other subjects also require extensive memorization. If you can't bear the thought of dissecting a creature, there are other options.)
If you don't write well, you should consider courses in which you can learn such skills as how to organize an essay. English departments offer expository writing courses, and many large universities offer courses at various skill levels. Since writing is a skill that improves with practice, you should find opportunities to write. Sometimes a part-time job provides opportunities: one recent Bradley graduate edited the newsletter that our faculty development office puts out to advise professors of opportunities for research grants and fellowships. She described it as extremely useful experience. Don't shirk courses that require term papers and essay exams. (Remember, Michigan Law School frowns on students who devote their undergraduate careers to the "avoidance of challenges.") The most valuable courses are those in which you have the opportunity to rewrite an essay or story several times under a teacher's supervision. Creative writing courses can be valuable if the teacher has time to give you this personal attention.
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