As part of my third year of the UCD Law with Economics degree, I was given the option to go away on an international exchange and I choose to go the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul in the south-east Minnesota. One of the biggest reasons for me wanting to go abroad for my third year was that I felt I needed to travel more and this exchange program gave me the perfect opportunity to do so whilst at the same time continuing my degree.
The first thing I noticed about the law school over here is how different it is to the Sutherland School of Law at home in UCD. There are 3 big reasons: the age difference, the way law is taught here, and the class sizes. The most noticeable difference is the age difference of law students here and in Dublin. In Dublin, we obviously go straight into UCD Law from secondary school but in the US, you cannot go to law school or med school unless you have already obtained a 4-year undergraduate degree first. So instead of at home in Dublin, where as a third year student of a 4 year degree I would be one of the oldest, here I was the youngest student of 750 students. The benefits of this are that you need to raise your level to stay afloat because all of the students, most of whom are in their mid-twenties but many of whom are married and in their early thirties are hugely competitive in the law school. As a result, the workload is much more intense here, and a lot of this is also due to the way law is taught in American universities, in what is known as the Socratic Method.
Instead of in UCD where all the students attend the lecture to listen to the lecturer talk for 2 hours with little student-lecturer interaction in the class, the Socratic Method is a method by which students are expected to have read all the material before class, the readings having been assigned to us before the class, and then we are called on by name to explain the facts of a case or why one case didn’t follow another, in front of the class, instead of the lecturer doing it as is the case at home. The idea is that students essentially teach each other the course and the professor merely acts as a conductor of proceedings instead of him being the main imparter of information. Some professors adopt this method more seriously than others, but even for those that only use it sometimes, the classes are still much more interactive and intense than in Dublin, where the lectures aren’t as daunting and are a little more relaxed.
The classes all have assigned seating, so the professor can know exactly where you are when he calls on you, and can also tell straight away therefore who is missing from a class if someone decides not to show up. The class sizes are also another big change from UCD. In UCD most of the law lectures have about 200 people in them, but in the law school the smallest class size I have is 4 people and the biggest is 35. This is done so that the professor gets a chance to call on more people than they could if there was 200 students in the class.
As a result of the intense readings, which are usually take about 3 hours a day, the learning process is definitely more intense but I feel that you grasp the cases much more having read them before class and having them explained to you after reading them, instead of the other way around. I also feel that it is a more effective method because it means you can develop your own view on a case before having the professor tell the class his or her view on the case, instead of the reverse, where I feel it is harder to mould your own view on a case once you have been already told the opinion of a lecturer.
Of the highlights so far on the law side of the exchange was when the University invited United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to teach a class to us. He began in the morning by taking an admin law class with us and gave his insights into the course from a Supreme Court point of view, and then later on that day, in a special lecture for all law students, alumni and the public, he gave an hour address on his different views and perceptions of the Constitution in front of 2,700 people in the university’s biggest auditorium, Northrop Auditorium.
Another huge benefit to going away is the new people you meet and it is has been amazing to meet so many people from different countries who are also studying law at the University. Before the formal academic year started here, all of the international law students were required to take an “Intro to American Law” course in which they taught us the basics of American law in a three week crash course. Not only was this a great way to get up to speed on the American legal way of doing things, but it was also a great way to meet the other international students. In total there are 84 international students, from an array of different countries. We have students from Spain, Russia, Germany, Chile, Burma, the Philippines, the Netherlands, Italy, Norway, Sweden, China, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Colombia, Brazil and France. To see all the different cultures combining has been amazing and it’s been great to be able to hear all about so many different cities and countries from them.
Apart from the law school itself, the city of Minneapolis has been brilliant to experience. I went to see a few of the University’s American football team’s games, and the atmosphere at those was always electric. To prove how big college football is over here, the college football stadium is the same size as Lansdowne Road Stadium in Dublin, and in the first University game of the year for the Minnesota football team (the Minnesota Gophers), they squeezed 55,000 supporters into the stadium! Apart from the American football, there have also been games of baseball (the Minnesota Twins is the state baseball team), which we went to which were also a lot of fun. As expected, the NFL is by far the biggest sport over in Minnesota and the Minnesota Vikings are the team that everyone naturally roots for. During my time there the Minnesota Vikings are having their new stadium built, the Vikings are currently playing their homes games at the Gophers’ stadium which is the equivalent of Leinster playing their home games at the Belfield Bowl, so it really adds an extra bit of atmosphere to campus life on match days.
Apart from that, one of the biggest attractions in the city of Minneapolis, is the Mall of America, which is the biggest shopping centre in the United States and is about half an hour from the law school. To give an idea of the size of the shopping centre, it is 4 times the size of Dundrum Town Centre, and it so big that it has its own postal code, so it’s a serious monster of a building to say the least. As well as that, the nightlife in Minneapolis is also a lot of fun. It tends to be a little more bar orientated that the nightclub craze at home in Dublin, but there are still a few clubs downtown to go to which are very similar to home, and the crazy frat parties are also something unique to America that any exchange student should experience.
As an exchange student, I naturally became very friendly with the other international exchange students that were at the Law School here because we were all in many of the same classes. However, most exchanges students from Europe only do a semester-long exchange and so when I came back in January, I didn’t know many of the American students and all the exchange students had gone home. As a result, I decided to get involved in the Law School Musical which runs every year and which was a great and fun way to get to know all of the other American students in the school.
I also got the chance to travel in March to Duluth, a city in North-East Minnesota, and Eveleth, which is a small town 45 minutes further north of Duluth. Duluth is set on Lake Superior so it was a beautiful city and it is also right beside Wisconsin so I got a chance to drive over to Wisconsin and see parts of Wisconsin which was also great to experience.
Overall, I couldn’t recommend Minneapolis highly enough for your international exchange destination, although it’s one downside is its fierce winter. Minnesota has the coldest winter in America, and last year the temperature got down to as low as -41 degrees Celsius, so if you are thinking about coming, you’d better pack a hefty ski jacket. During the winter of two years ago, during the polar vortex that Minnesota experienced, there was one day when Eveleth was the coldest place on earth at nearly -55 degrees Celcius that day. Apart from the cold though, it is an amazing city and I’m loving every minute of it, and would recommend to anyone who is offered it as an exchange option to seriously consider it.
