How to have a good first week

Now that reading assignments have been distributed, a touch of stress is setting in. For our first day, we had to brief Pennoyer v. Neff, which entails reading the Supreme Court's opinion and summarizing the main points/newly produced judicial precedent. Not only did this pose the challenge of learning how to brief without any prior instruction, it was also a pretty complex opinion that had me re-reading the same sentence ten to fifteen times. I'll definitely put out a guide to case briefing when I get the hang of it, but for now I am sloughing through these dense readings and trying to learn my basics. My first Civil Procedure class was two straight hours of mental gymnastics as we reviewed the case. Turns out almost everything I wrote in my brief was wrong or incomplete. I haven't felt so intellectually exhausted in a very long time. It's a great feeling to be able to study a subject that I enjoy grappling with, but I'm slightly worried about building up the stamina to stay ahead of my coursework. While I take a break from studying, here's the inside scoop.FIND YOUR TRIBEI've made some great friends at law school so far. Today we had a really long lunch break and I had a wholesome conversation with people who make me think deeply and who make me laugh out loud. So far, the miserable experience that law school was made out to be seems far away. I think that feeling is because making these new friends has made this feel like summer camp so far.Many of my classmates have been eager to help me secure copies of the reading (my textbooks are still on back order), and total strangers have happily compared and discussed case briefs with me. Though everyone is nice, I've found that the best conversations happened when I opened up and shared a silly story or a slightly ~controversial take~ or I even just admitted how hard the civ pro reading was for me too. It's hard to give advice on how to make really good friends really fast, especially because opening up quickly to people often makes you toe the line of professional boundaries and does require you to be a bit more vulnerable than normal, but trust your gut and assume the best in people.  I don't think you can ever regret an open heart.BE EARLYClasses still feel a bit strange. In college, I rarely had classes with 100 people, but here that's the way all of my classes are (except for my legal writing seminar). Also, everyone is a huge nerd! That shifts the paradigm for the classroom quite a bit. I was 20-30 minutes early for all of my classes today and I still didn't get a seat in the first five rows of the lecture halls. I had to stay in the middle or back in all of my classes. Having a seat in the front row really isn't worth getting to class an hour early for me, but if you're picky, you'd probably have to budget enough time to get to class 45 minutes to an hour early. (yikes!)SPEAK UPAs far as speaking up in class goes, I stayed quiet on the first day out of fear of being labeled a gunner (which I totally am, regardless). Later, I kicked myself for doing that because I remembered that participation and the final exam are the only two components of my final grade. That means every class is an opportunity to win GPA points, and the only way to do that is to make meaningful contributions to the discussion. Also, when I did speak up in class, other people came up and talked to me about my answers later. Speaking up has the added bonus of being an easy conversation starter, especially if you or your professor manages to make a joke out of a cold call.