Reading time: three minutes

After a long and gruelling three years of endless case law, reading and caffeine, my degree is slowly coming to an end, and (although I missed the first year of my ‘university experience’ due to covid-19) part of me believes there’s so much more I could’ve and should’ve done.

Now I’m not going to sit here and say that these tips I was given will be critical to your future degree, but they’ll hopefully help you in the long run. 

Get involved

The first tip I didn’t listen to was to get involved. I know, I know it’s harder than it looks. If you're anything like me, you’ll say yes to plans and agree to attend events but, in reality, you were never going. It’s much easier to stay inside your comfort zone (especially when you’re living at home and not at university) but getting involved in the university’s law society or going for food with friends on your course are such great ways to not only make friends but to also enjoy the time you spend at university. 

Work experience

My second tip is to gain some work experience or volunteer work in the first and second year of your degree. I had reached my third year and still hadn’t thought much about getting any legal experience because I didn’t know which area of law I wanted to go into. Big mistake. During my third year I was bombarded with advice on how to write an effective CV, what cover letters look like and what law firms were looking for, and legal experience was an element that kept cropping up – and I didn’t have any. This left me with 12 months to gain legal experience, complete my law degree and write a dissertation. 

You can visit LawCareers.Net’s Application hub for advice on acing your applications and interviews.

Pro bono

There are many ways to look for and build up legal experience. I personally went to the university and looked for any pro bono work I could gain, including volunteering at Citizens Advice and legal charities. I also emailed law firms asking whether they had any work experience opportunities for candidates at my stage. Although you have to be prepared for some rejection, many of these opportunities will present themselves to you, so just keep applying, asking and networking. 

If you’ll be qualifying as a solicitor via the Solicitors Qualifying Exam (SQE), the legal experience you gain could count towards the qualifying work experience (QWE) requirement of the SQE.

You can find out more about QWE via LawCareers.Net’s SQE hub, sponsored by The University of Law.

Don’t put too much pressure on yourself

Finally, you don’t need to know what you want to do for the rest of your life when you start your degree. Sure, it's handy but it’s not essential. I stressed myself out endlessly because I didn’t know what I wanted to do after university but I wish I’d just enjoyed my course instead.

When the right area of law or the right career proposes itself to you, you’ll hopefully know that’s what you want to carry on with. For me, it was family law which, while not everyone’s favourite, I really enjoy. I only discovered my interested in this area in the past six months of my degree – just in time to apply for my master’s degree. 

So, in short: get involved; get some experience; and don’t put too much pressure on yourself about what you want to do after university.