Hello, my name is Sarah Moya. I'm a first year student at Fordham University School of Law. So, I spent the last two years working at Brooklyn Criminal Court for a program called Supervised Release.
While I was there I worked with a lot of attorneys, including public defenders, and it was there where I kind of realized my vocation to become a public defender, and specifically specialize in working for immigrant rights within that world.
So, I actually graduated from Villanova University five years ago. I spent two years working as a professional actor and bartender in Philadelphia.
Then I moved to Ecuador through a program called WorldTeach, and I was in Ecuador for a year. Then I came back, moved to Brooklyn, and worked for the Center for Court Innovation for a non-profit called Brooklyn Justice Initiatives,
where I was working in the criminal court arraignment, screening people for supervised release. I just kind of realized with acting it wasn't, I felt like it was very self-serving, and I wasn't serving a public good.
I wanted my life's work to contribute to general welfare, and not just serve myself, not that art can't do really wonderful things for the world, but I felt like I wanted a more direct service component in working with communities that don't ordinarily get a voice.
When you start law school, all your courses are selected for you. You're sorted into sections. Fordham has eight sections, and I'm in section eight.
There's 45 people in my section. And we have our schedule given to us. We take four doctrinal classes per, I guess like four and a half doctrinal classes in the first year,
and then five in the second semester, just depending on what you would call Legal Writing, which is a year-long course. And then that's all selected for you.
You either take it with your section or your super section, which is a combination of two sections. So classes range from 12 people for your Legal Writing class, to 90 people for your doctrinal classes.
So, I'm taking Contracts, Torts, Criminal Law, Legal Research and Legal Writing right now. Legal Research is like you take five courses, and it's a pass/fail.
The other classes are graded based off of an exam at the end of the year. Or, with Legal Writing, you get a short memo, a long memo, and an appellate brief that you're graded on. (jazzy music) So, we're on the Lincoln Center campus, which is where the entire law school is.
We're kind of in the Commons on the first floor right now. This is the new law school that was built. The old law school was not here, or, it was here, I don't know the answer to that question. But, this is the new law school.
It's a new building, and it's equipped with a moot courtroom, a trial advocacy room, classrooms, the library, a cafeteria, and several other offices for professors and student groups.
So, I'd say law school is different from undergrad in that you're not just dealing with younger people, but you're also dealing with people who have work experience, who come into this with a very specific agenda or objective. People tend to treat it sort of like a nine to five.
People, even if they don't have class right away in the morning, they'll come to the library at 9:00 a.m. and work until class, and usually people will stay in the library until 5:00 or 6:00 o'clock.
I think out of all the New York law schools, Fordham tends to be more collaborative, just because we're not in one of the top ten schools, but we're still very competitive. And a lot of people at Fordham want to go corporate, or go into BigLaw.
But, generally speaking, people are willing to share their outlines, which are like study tools that people use. They share notes. If you miss a class, you can very easily get the notes from another classmate. But it also depends on what we're all doing.
I'm in public interest, a world where your job experience is more important than your grades, so people tend to focus more on the experience, and your volunteerism and your student groups that you're involved with rather than being in the top 10% of the class.
I love this campus. I felt like it was a good balance of collaboration and competition. I feel like I want to do well, but I'm not cracking under the pressure. And the public interest program is pretty small, which means you have unique access to the professors, and you kinda get to be a big fish in a little pond.
Right now I'm taking Torts, Contracts, Criminal Law, Legal Research and Legal Writing. Legal Writing lasts throughout the whole year, and you're with the same professor. It's a 12 person class. You're working on different types of legal writing, including memos and appellate briefs.
Tort law is one of my 90 person courses. It's very case law oriented, or common law oriented, which means we're reading a lot of cases.
We're taking notes and briefing the cases, and when we're in class it's a lot of what are the facts of the case, what happened in the case, what did the judge rule in the case, what did the appellate court say.
And then picking what rule comes out of the case law and applying it to other hypothetical situations. Contract law is one of my smaller classes because it's my writing intensive course.
So, we've done things like, done contracts together, we've done in-class props to sort of supplement that. And it's a higher credit course than my Torts and my Criminal Law course. You're kind of figuring out where you want to specialize.
But you could also take more general seminar-based courses. There's a sentencing seminar, there's a seminar, Employment, I think. But, just a variety of different ways to take classes.
You will still have some lecture courses, like Corporations, which I do believe is also 40 to 90 people. But as you go higher up, your classes get smaller and more specialized.
So, overall this first year, I haven't really gotten into the meat of what stresses people out. And, in that sense, everything's felt really collaborative, really supportive.
The professors are super accessible, I've been to office hours. I work really closely with my Stein mentor, sorry, Stein Scholars is a public interest program that I'm a part of. That network has been really important to me in remembering why I'm in law school.
And I think that's like the biggest thing of advice for, if you are about to start law school, is find your network, find what you're passionate about.
It's going to be hard to balance your school work with that, but just always make time for yourself and make time for what you're passionate about, because it reminds you why you're there.
My advice to people applying to Fordham, just make sure to remember that it is a holistic application, it's not just about your test scores.
Really put a lot of effort into your personal statement, make sure you're coming in with experience that represents who you are and what you care about.
Even if you don't know exactly what you want to do, it's important to show that you're dedicated to your community in some capacity. And don't stress about your scores. I didn't do great, and I still got a scholarship to Fordham. So, don't stress about that.
