Academic Experience
UGA Law offers hands-on, purpose-driven education at a great value. UGA Law students benefit from rigorous course work, extracurricular opportunities to enhance their skills like the negotiation competition team, support through the Academic Enhancement Program, and a new Alternative Dispute Resolution Certification program.
Transcript
The first-year curriculum here is in some ways quite traditional in that you know you have to learn your kind of core black letter law classes, you have torts, you have contracts, criminal law.
But I think at UGA Law, you know, we're really committed as a faculty to, you know, helping these students settle into life here beyond just, "What are the facts of this case?" But, "What are they hoping to do in the summer after their first year? What interests do they have beyond the law? How can they, you know, achieve a healthy work-life balance?"
Those are conversations that I have on a regular basis with my students and I encourage them to come to me with those questions. Because I think they're just as important as the sort of details of the law that we're teaching them when we're in the classroom with them.
We understand that the first year can be a challenge to many students. So we offer what's referred to as our "Academic Enhancement Program," sometimes referred to as our "1L Series." And it's a series of lunch presentations or panels, where students are introduced to different forms of study skills.
The Negotiation Competition Team is a really great opportunity for anyone who wants transferrable skills around communication. And whether you're doing transactional work making deals, you're doing litigation and trying to have conversations before you reach the courtroom, finding a way to bring people together, I think it's a really important set of skills. And I've gotten a lot of experience with that from the Negotiation Competition Team.
The School of Law has created a new certificate in alternative dispute resolution. Students can take classes in mediation, negotiation, ADR in the workplace, and a survey or capstone of different ADR concerns in the 21st century.
The thing that makes UGA Law stand out to me the most is how incredible of a value it is for such a great rigorous academic education. There's just no better place to be able to go to law school, get an excellent education, while also ensuring that you're gonna give yourself the freedom to be able to pursue the career that you want to pursue because you're not going to be saddled with debt the way that a lot of other people who are going to law school are.
I just think that's a really, really special opportunity that I'm really thankful that UGA presents in that I am getting to take advantage of.
