Ask a Current Student

[Dussy]

Happy to answer any questions!

[waterfall]

Heya thanks for doing this! How does the tutoring program at Queen’s law work and what do you think about your experience with it (or what have you heard about it if you haven’t participated)? Can you get a different tutor for each subject/have multiple tutors? Thanks in advance for answering!

[QMT20]

As someone who both had a tutor in my 1L year and tutored in my upper years I would say that for academics it really depends on the tutor you get. All tutors are in the top 25% or so of their class but they won't all put the same amount of effort into tutoring. Some tutors are willing to review your profs questions with you, go over your midterms, and provide substantive help for your courses. Other tutors help you get access to some good upper year outlines and that's about it. You can ask Helen for multiple tutors if you want, and you can ask for tutors for specific courses. Most people don't get a tutor for each class, but if you feel like you're struggling in a particular subject, you can ask Helen for a tutor who might have been a course prize winner in that subject and she'll help you set something up. 

The benefit of having a tutor though is I do think it helps you settle into the school and it gives you a bit of an advance perspective into upper year life. Pretty much every tutor can help you learn how to brief cases, a basic skill for law school, early on in 1L. They can also help you meet people in their year who are pursuing areas that you might be interested in. I didn't really have any idea about what formal recruitment, or any of those things were when I was in 1L and I think relationships with upper year students just give you a place to turn if you have general questions about how different things work. As well, it gives you someone to turn to if you want help setting up informational interviews when you start going through the recruits. 

[Dussy]

2 hours ago, vinoandsunshine said:

Heya thanks for doing this! How does the tutoring program at Queen’s law work and what do you think about your experience with it (or what have you heard about it if you haven’t participated)? Can you get a different tutor for each subject/have multiple tutors? Thanks in advance for answering!

I would echo what @QMT20said.

I just finished 1L. I primarily used my tutor for 'logistical' questions, such as how to approach a prof for a reference letter, or how to access old exams and/or graded answers. However, I know some people used theirs for more substantive issues about the course material. 

Overall, my experience with my tutor was fantastic and she was extremely nice and helpful. I highly recommend the service to all incoming 1Ls.

[curious8]

Can anyone request for a tutor?

[Dussy]

1 minute ago, curious8 said:

Can anyone request for a tutor?

Yes. If I remember correctly Helen will send an email to all incoming 1Ls in early July (after the firm acceptance date on OLSAS) saying that everyone who wants a tutor should let her know. She actually set up a phone call with me in July to discuss the tutoring program but I am not sure if that is standard or only because I (presumably) was one of the first to respond. Regardless, she will then match you and your tutor will contact you.

[curious8]

1 minute ago, Dussy said:

Yes. If I remember correctly Helen will send an email to all incoming 1Ls in early July (after the firm acceptance date on OLSAS) saying that everyone who wants a tutor should let her know. She actually set up a phone call with me in July to discuss the tutoring program but I am not sure if that is standard or only because I (presumably) was one of the first to respond. Regardless, she will then match you and your tutor will contact you.

Thank you! 

[King of Queens]

Does anyone have any info on the internship at the Department of Justice I see on the Queens website, I'm curious what this exactly entails? It seems that you need to commute to Ottawa once or twice a week as well so I'm curious to how this works.

[BlushAndTheBar]

7 minutes ago, King of Queens said:

Does anyone have any info on the internship at the Department of Justice I see on the Queens website, I'm curious what this exactly entails? It seems that you need to commute to Ottawa once or twice a week as well so I'm curious to how this works.

From my understanding you do have to commute to Ottawa from Kingston once a week (from what a colleague of mine has informed me). However, this year that requirement to commute seems unlikely. 

[King of Queens]

51 minutes ago, BlushAndTheBar said:

From my understanding you do have to commute to Ottawa from Kingston once a week (from what a colleague of mine has informed me). However, this year that requirement to commute seems unlikely. 

Yeah, it'd be surprised if the university sponsored that type of movement, I'm only starting 1L so the pandemic better be over when I apply for this in a year or two haha.

On a separate note does anyone have insight into the ETA for course schedules? When were they sent out last year?

[Dussy]

35 minutes ago, King of Queens said:

Yeah, it'd be surprised if the university sponsored that type of movement, I'm only starting 1L so the pandemic better be over when I apply for this in a year or two haha.

On a separate note does anyone have insight into the ETA for course schedules? When were they sent out last year?

The timetable is being released on July 23 so 1Ls will likely get their schedule around then as well. It was at a similar time last year.

Edited June 7, 2021 by Dussy

[Major_Agnostic]

On 6/7/2021 at 10:16 AM, King of Queens said:

Yeah, it'd be surprised if the university sponsored that type of movement, I'm only starting 1L so the pandemic better be over when I apply for this in a year or two haha.

I’ll start by saying that I’m answering based on the assumption that, by DOJ internship, you mean the federal government internship, as I’m not aware of the former being on the Queen’s site.

I’m not quite sure how keen gov will be on returning to in-person anytime soon, even post-pandemic. They seem to look at working from home in quite a good light, based on the impressions of gov people I know. But that shouldn’t matter too much, since the internship won’t take up a very significant portion of your weeks anyway.

I applied this year (about to start 2L), so if you want some more info on it, feel free to ask, although I haven’t heard back yet. I also have some info on the different federal offices that I could join this year that I could PM.

[MayWakyu]

Does Queen’s Law fair well when it comes to Big Law hires? 

[QueensDenning]

16 hours ago, JohnAppleseed said:

Does Queen’s Law fair well when it comes to Big Law hires? 

You can check the published numbers (I don’t have a link handy, but I think it’s called “ultravires”). Queens places about 30% of its class in the big law OCI’s. Similar to Western, but lower than UofT and slightly lower than Os. 

 

[Major_Agnostic]

On 6/15/2021 at 2:26 PM, Major_Agnostic said:

I applied this year (about to start 2L), so if you want some more info on it, feel free to ask, although I haven’t heard back yet. I also have some info on the different federal offices that I could join this year that I could PM.

I was recently accepted and got my top choice of office! If anyone has questions, feel free to PM or reply. I don't have much info on what I'll actually be doing or how frequently though.

[King of Queens]

On 6/27/2021 at 2:10 AM, Major_Agnostic said:

I was recently accepted and got my top choice of office! If anyone has questions, feel free to PM or reply. I don't have much info on what I'll actually be doing or how frequently though.

Do you know where specifically you'll be working?

[Major_Agnostic]

On 6/28/2021 at 8:42 AM, King of Queens said:

Do you know where specifically you'll be working?

The Bijuralism and Advisory Services Section of the DOJ.

[Jurgen Klopp]

Can you clear up what a "outline" or "attack outline" is for final exams? Ive read it might be useful to start building earlier in the semester, but I dont fully understand how it differs from just regular notes. 

[LMP]

3 minutes ago, Jurgen Klopp said:

Can you clear up what a "outline" or "attack outline" is for final exams? Ive read it might be useful to start building earlier in the semester, but I dont fully understand how it differs from just regular notes. 

I don't go to Queens but I can't imagine it being particularly different from school to school. 

You have to understand that the primary challenge during your exams with be time. More often than not the exam is open book but you have limited time and hunting for the info you need in your notes is using up that time. 

Especially when your notes can reach 20k words (and I consider myself a succinct note taker). 

So what you do is reduce your notes to the key points. For example, instead of purusing through every contracts case brief and lecture slide, I'd simply have to glance at my attack outline. Or during a torts exam I could look at once to the relevant tests for a given tort.

[Peculiar Frond]

Your in-semester course notes will likely be unwieldy by the time an exam comes around. When taking notes, I’d focus on individual cases: the facts, ratio, and ultimate disposition.  An outline, by contrast, is an attempt to structure all the information you have learned into an easily navigated format, generally organize by topic. I think it’s helpful to think of an outline emphasizing rules and principles, where cases serve as examples. Notes typically emphasize cases, their facts, and ratios, and dispositions.  

So that’s the difference between notes and an outline, as I see it. As for attack outlines and maps, I think those are also different from outlines and notes. (Controversial! Some people think they’re just different terms for the same thing.)

I see an outline as being comprehensive but well-organized. An attack outline prioritizes ease-of-use, bearing in mind that you write an exam under time pressure. A map is even more barebones — possibly visual — and literally serves to guide you through an answer and nothing more. 

I think effective exam writing requires that you figure out which of the above works best for you, personally. So it’s worth experimenting. In my experience, I could only come to understand a course through making an outline (often, an extremely long outline) from my in-semester notes. The process of making the outline was laborious, but essentially all the studying I’d do. By the time that was done, I felt confident about writing the exam. I didn’t feel the need to make a map or attack outline. 

Other people swore by maps and attack outlines, relying on upper-year summaries to learn the material at a high level. For these people, the outlining process wasn’t necessary — but they often would make a short (i.e., just a few pages) attack outline for the exam. 

[King of Queens]

I am a mere 1L, but I found that many of my exams were 2 hours. Which meant I had almost no time to go through my large outline. Through relying solely on my attack outline and a few checks in my large outline I was able to do quite well because I had lots of time/word count left for analysis (which is the bulk of the mark). I found the attack outline invaluable personally, however creating the large outline was my entire studying process for the exam.

Edited February 16, 2022 by King of Queens

[frostedflake]

Do many professors use cold calls during class? If they do, are you told which day you'll be called on?

[QueensDenning]

13 minutes ago, frostedflake said:

Do many professors use cold calls during class? If they do, are you told which day you'll be called on?

Depends on the prof. Some cold call and are border line mean about it if they don't agree with your answer (maybe one prof I can think of), some cold call but go by a list so you know which day(s) you'll be cold called on. Most don't cold call at all, but pose questions to the class and move on if no one answers. At the end of the day, cold-calling doesn't matter - aside from maybe looking bad in front of your classmates - but literally no one cares. 

[toby1994]

On 4/28/2022 at 10:54 AM, frostedflake said:

Do many professors use cold calls during class? If they do, are you told which day you'll be called on?

Just finished 1L at Queen’s. 5/6 of my profs didn’t cold call, one of my profs would call on people maybe 25% of the time and then rely on volunteers for the other 75%. Even then, you always had the option to pass and no one was ever shamed for not knowing an answer, including myself! I may have just gotten lucky, but the consensus here seems to be that most profs don’t cold call.

[Major_Agnostic]

On 4/29/2022 at 12:27 PM, toby1994 said:

Just finished 1L at Queen’s. 5/6 of my profs didn’t cold call, one of my profs would call on people maybe 25% of the time and then rely on volunteers for the other 75%. Even then, you always had the option to pass and no one was ever shamed for not knowing an answer, including myself! I may have just gotten lucky, but the consensus here seems to be that most profs don’t cold call.

Just finished 2L at Queen’s and yeah this is pretty typical. So glad because I only pay attention 50% of the time in class, if I even go. Plus I don’t read shit except an outline, if I found one lol