The Law School Experience: An Interview with FSU History Alumna Sarah Dinkins

I grew up an FSU fan, and I decided that this was the college I wanted to go to. I got admitted through the Pathways program, which stipulated that I do my first semester at a community college. I did that, spent a semester at Tallahassee Community College, and then transferred to FSU. I chose History, because I had always enjoyed it in high school, and I loved reading history books. I am not a STEM person or a big fiction reader, so History felt right from the beginning.

After graduation, I did not immediately know what I wanted to do with my degree. I was thinking about staying in academia, but I was a little hesitant because I knew that path was difficult. I did not want to teach high school. A lot of my friends went on to law school, so I did some research and decided to give it a try. I am so very glad I did, and History was the best degree to prepare me for it. It made law school so much easier.

A large part of law school is doing research and writing. That is all you really do, once you get past the first year. Having been a History major prepared me for that. While the search engines are different, I know how to operate them, what to look for. My senior seminar gave me a crash course in research, analysis and synthesis of information, and how to write persuasively to defend my arguments. That is what I do now, especially for moot court, where I need to write a brief and defend it based on my research.

I was wait-listed for FSU law school twice but got into Mercer law the first time I applied. For me, doing practice problems in a test-like setting was the best prep for taking the LSAT. That got me ready for the timing of the test, which was a big challenge for me. It also helped me see the pattern of the types of questions that were being asked, so I became better at completing them under pressure.

I accepted Mercer Law School because I liked the atmosphere, and because they offered me some financial aid. Macon, Georgia, is not a very expensive place to live, so my money stretches further than it might in other places. The culture at Mercer Law is very friendly, welcoming and collaborative, which made it the right choice for me.

The first two semesters in law school, you don’t pick any of your classes. Everybody does the same set of foundational law courses. But then once you get into your second year, you can choose electives. What I enjoy most about law school is being around people. I had not realized how much I missed that because of Covid and Zoom classes, and then I also worked remotely before I came to Mercer. Having a normal social structure and a circle of friends to be with is just so very nice.

You have to be more disciplined in law school than in undergrad. There are similarities but in law school, you have to go to every class, need to do the reading, and need to take notes all the time. If you do that already as an undergrad, then law school will be a bit more demanding but not too much. I held down a job all the way through undergrad, and an internship, and did my course work, so managing my time in law school was not that challenging.

There are no weekly quizzes or monthly tests in law school. There is just one exam at the end of the semester which determines your grade. In the beginning that thought was very scary. But then I realized that our grades were on a bell curve. As an undergrad you get the grade that you deserve based on your work. In law school, you get a grade in relation to the other students in your class. Every law school has a mandatory average; for Mercer it is 84.5 but it can be as high as 86, that is professor’s discretion. That means the median score of a class will be 84.5. So, even if you did poorly, you might still end up with an 80 or 82. It all depends on how your classmates perform. If it was a difficult test, you might all be doing badly, you will still have the median class grade be an 84.5. Once I understood that, I became less anxious about the end of semester exam.

If you get a bad grade in one or two classes, it won’t destroy your GPA. I am happy to say that I am a very average student. I am not at the top of my grade scale. I am in the middle third of my class, which means that I come in at 84.5 most of the time. I am about to finish 2L. I have a very good balance between coursework and personal life; I don’t feel stressed.

In my second year, I had one or two law classes a day, I was part of moot court, and I worked in a low-income tax clinic for middle Georgia. The one class I really enjoyed that year was persuasive writing which taught me how not to write in a boring manner, how to make a dull topic fun to read. It made me a stronger writer, and you can apply it anywhere from trial work to clerkships for judges.

My great love though is moot court. Mercer Law is known for its advocacy programs, which consists of moot court, mock trial and a few other teams that center on alternative dispute resolution. Moot court is set in an appellate-level court, usually the Supreme Court, and you are given a lower court’s opinion and have to argue either for the respondent or the petitioner. You need to write a brief based on the lower court’s opinion, and then you stand in front of a judge and argue your case. It is a competitive program, and we are divided into teams and compete against other law schools across the country. I was able to compete in my second year. My brief got the third highest score of all the 28 teams that competed, which I am very proud of! I will continue with moot court next year, too.

After law school, I will start working for a real estate firm in my hometown. I am looking forward to doing real estate law. Before then, I’ll need to pass the bar though. I’ll be taking the Florida bar next summer.

My advice to other History majors who are considering becoming a lawyer is to start developing the good habits you need for law school already in undergrad. Go to class, pay attention and take notes, read the books on the syllabus, complete all your assignments – and put in effort when you are doing them, and get good grades. That is 90% of the battle. Having a job during undergrad or being involved in extracurriculars is also good. Having work experience shows that you can work with other people, you can manage your time, you can be a professional.

If you are applying for multiple law schools, go and tour every one of them. You can glean so much about their culture, their vibe. That’s not something you can easily learn from online research. There are law schools that are very competitive, and others that are less so. I was not looking for anything hyper competitive, but others might be, and finding what you want determines your law school experience and your law school career.