It Takes a Village to Pass the Bar Exam
Dr. Mary Campbell Gallagher's Five BarWrite® Tips for Persuading Family and Friends to Help You Focus While You Prepare for the Bar Exam
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nobody passes the bar exam alone. Successful bar candidates say their families helped them focus not just by encouraging them but by letting them study in peace. One successful bar candidate sent her husband home to his mother for two months so she could study for the New York bar exam. Another candidate sent his two-year-old son back to his home country. Long-time bar-preparation educator Dr. Mary Campbell Gallagher, president of New York-based BarWrite®, says that the bar exam is stressful for everyone. But with support from family and friends, bar candidates can sail confidently through the bar-preparation period.
Dr. Gallagher offers bar candidates five tips for persuading family and friends to help them focus while they prepare for the bar exam.
1. Empower your family to help you eliminate non-essential activities. Explain that bar-preparation is all-consuming for everyone, not just you, and ask them to tell Uncle Harry why you can't go to his house for dinner on Sunday.
2. Enlist your spouse or significant other. You can't see much of him or her while you are preparing for the bar exam, let alone plan your wedding, but you can pledge your eternal gratitude.
3. Promise your roommates a great party later if they will help shelter you from outside voices now. Just for these two months, you must unplug your television set and seal yourself off from newspapers, radio, and the internet.
4. Ask for understanding from family and friends when you can't respond to telephone calls and emails. Then put a message on your phone line that says, "I will return calls after August 1," and an autoresponder on your email account that says, "I will answer messages after August 1."
5. Don't forget your mother. Your mother will be very proud when you become a lawyer, and she deserves your call. Staying in touch with your mother and saying Thank you will clear your conscience and help you focus on studying for the bar exam.
BACKGROUND ON DR. MARY CAMPBELL GALLAGHER. A graduate of Harvard Law School who holds the Ph.D. in linguistics, Dr. Mary Campbell Gallagher is president of New York-based BarWrite® and BarWrite Press, which offer large courses preparing candidates for the bar exam, and author of the book and CDs Scoring High on Bar Exam Essays, which the St. John's Law School Forum called possibly "the best money you can spend on bar exam preparation." Dr. Gallagher is preparing a study guide for the Multistate Performance Test (MPT). She is an Adjunct Instructor in the School of Continuing and Professional Studies at NYU.
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